The Land of Cokaygne occupies a unique place in medieval English poetry. It survives only in one manuscript, London, British Library Harley 913, which most recent scholars agree was copied in Ireland, for the most part by a single hand, around 1330. The codex contains much verse and prose in Latin, and a little in French, as well as a collection of Middle English verse. The text of Cokaygne is not an autograph, so the poem remains hard to date with complete precision. We cannot dismiss the dating suggested by older scholars, to the second half of the thirteenth century. Attempts to date Cokaygne later, in the first decades of the fourteenth, have always presupposed certain historical judgments, for instance attempts to link it with other Middle English poetry in the manuscript. Yet such links seem to me improbable, not least because this poem is far more original and outstanding than any of the other English poems in the collection.

In his article of 2003, Neil Cartlidge has shown that all the historical judgments about Harley 913 made so far are only conjectures, which must be re-examined and on which no certainties have yet been reached. Is this manuscript a ‘friars' miscellany’, as it has often been called? How many of the fifty-odd pieces it contains can safely be called Franciscan? How many can be called Irish? (Cartlidge goes into some detail about the provenance of the many Latin pieces, very few of which can be called either Franciscan or Irish with any certainty.) Was the manuscript copied at Kildare, or Waterford, or elsewhere?