THE Brut chronicle family has many branches, as Lister Matheson and others have increasingly brought to light. Although Castleford's Chronicle, the immensely long verse chronicle to be discussed here, is surely one of the lesser relations and had, to my knowledge, no direct progeny, nevertheless it is a valuable witness to the development of the Brut tradition in a northern English context. This chronicle is known to exist in only one manuscript, which, as I will show, can be traced from a Yorkshire origin, as the fifteenth-century product of an imperfect collaboration between two main scribes and a rubricator; to a probable sojourn in Westminster or London in conjunction with its ownership by an avid book collector who was, by one dubious account, perhaps also a murderer; to an eighteenth-century transition to the Continent among the household goods of a Londoner serving as a minor official in Germany, where it acquired its present designation as Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, MS 2o Cod. hist. 740 Cim. This itinerary shows the continuing circulation of a somewhat aberrant version of the underlying Brut narrative across regional and national distances and across time.

Recent studies of England's medieval book culture have emphasized the importance of diversified and interrelated networks of writers, readers and owners of books, not only in London as the main metropolitan center but also in other cities and in local and regional contexts, including Yorkshire and other parts of the North of England, which were active sites of production and ownership. At York, as John Friedman has shown, scriveners, flourishers and illuminators had formed a gild by 1425, and there are records of the activities of individual and amateur scribes, as well as professional book production collaborations that included a scribe, a binder, an illuminator and sometimes an editor or overseer.

Like Chaucer's narrator, we too look eagerly upon books written with old letters: one of the characteristics of current research in medieval studies is a renewed attention to the manuscript book as a material object whose physical structure, ink, parchment or paper, sequence of adjacent texts, annotations and other traits can constitute guides to the cultural roles that the book played and to questions of ownership, readership and interpretation. To mention just two examples, much has been learned about the circulation and transmission of Arthurian historiography, as in Lister Matheson's study that inventoried the more than 240 manuscripts of the Prose Brut, catalogued most of them in detail, and sorted out the versions; and many individual manuscripts have been shown to preserve information from which the interests of medieval readers can be inferred, as in Elizabeth Bryan's analysis of the red lettering, including faint traces newly recovered, that reveals a rubricator's marking of ‘potentially sensational Arthurian material especially surrounding Guinevere’ in the Otho manuscript of LaƷamon's Brut. But much remains to be done, and in this paper I should like to explore the use of manuscript evidence in interpreting Arthurian narratives of questing, especially in the English historiographical tradition.