the former Angevin lands along the river Loire, well acquainted with the cities and castles of Anjou and Normandy. Manuscript There is a single manuscript of the work, which the young Paul Meyer noticed in 1861 browsing the sale room of Sotheby's during the disposal of the manuscripts of Saville collection, compiled by the justice and antiquary Sir John Savile in the late 16th century. It was swept up by the bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps at the time and did not resurface till Meyer tracked it down amongst the remnants of Phillipps estate in 1880 and was able to study and identify it for what it was. In 1958 it was acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, where it remains as manuscript M. 888. It is a book of 127 folios in a mid 13th century hand. It is not the author's original manuscript but a copy of one of his drafts by an English copyist who modified the original language towards his own Anglo-Norman dialect. Three other copies are once know to have existed from medieval library catalogues. Date and Sources Paul Meyer in his edition of the History calculated that the author commenced his work for his patron William Marshal the Younger in 1224, when the young earl left to take up his appointment as justiciar of Ireland and worked on it till the summer of 1226. David Crouch's analysis of the author's sources revealed by his work finds that the poet was an assiduous researcher. He deployed a range of items he found in the Marshal family archive for the early period of the Marshal's life, many of them generated by his tournament career: lists of ransoms, a French language history of the exploits of his master Young King Henry between 1176 and 1182, and a great roll of the French royal tournament of Lagny-sur-Marne in 1179. For the later period he had access to Marshal's state correspondence and solicited written memoirs from the old man's friends and colleagues for the period from the 1180s onward. The author counted for much of the colour of his work on family anecdotes passed on to him by Marshal's sons and his knight and executor, John of Earley. On one occasion he can be proved to have used for the Marshal's childhood a Latin chronicle then kept at Gloucester Abbey. Reception Since Meyer's edition the History has