Manuscripts The story of Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle is found in two manuscript versions, one dating to around 1400 and another, the Percy Folio, dating to c. 1650. There are no known printed versions prior to 19th and 20th-century transcriptions of the manuscript texts. The story, as told in a tail-rhyme romance of 660 lines dating to about 1400, is found in National Library of Wales, Porkington MS 10. This manuscript was copied, possibly in Shropshire, England, in "about 1460 or a little later" and the version of Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle it preserves was probably written in the northwest of England. The story found as a 'minstrel piece' in British Library Additional MS 27879, the Percy Folio, consists of 501 lines in rhyming couplets and is sometimes known as The Carle of Carlisle. Plot (This plot summary is based upon the tail-rhyme version of the story found in National Library of Wales, Porkington MS 10.) King Arthur is in Cardiff with all his noblemen, looking forward to some fine hunting. The deer in the forest are fat and ready to unleash the dogs at. And so, as in the broadly contemporary Middle English story The Awntyrs off Arthure, the tale begins with the king and all his retinue riding out into the forest to hunt. Unlike the Awntyrs off Arthure, however, the scene is not Inglewood Forest; although curiously, it soon will be. Deer are slaughtered in their hundreds and Sir Gawain is soon riding with Sir Kay and Bishop Baldwin (these three figure in another late-14th-century Middle English Arthurian poem set, like the Awntyrs off Arthure, in Inglewood Forest: The Avowyng of Arthur, in which Sir Gawain undergoes a vigil at the haunted Tarn Wathenene). They are riding after a very fit deer that leads them tirelessly through the forests around Cardiff, over moors and by late afternoon, rather strangely, through a mist and into Inglewood Forest. As daylight begins to fail and the weather closes in, the three of them arrive at the gates of a castle belonging to the Carle of Carlisle. Inglewood forest, near Carlisle, on the English borders with Scotland, lies about three hundred miles from Cardiff. This may possibly be a confusion on the part of the anonymous author of this tale. A principal city called Carduel is, after all, mentioned by Robert de Boron in his