_Cest rym fust fet al bois desouz vn lorer, La chaunte merle, russinole, e crye l'esperuer. Escrit estoit en parchemyn pur mout remenbrer, Et gitté en haut chemyn, qe vm le dust trouer.[24]_ These loose sheets or tiny rolls[25] rarely survive, and the preservation of their contents, as of pieces launched still more carelessly on the world, depends on the happy chance of inclusion in a miscellany; quotation in a larger work; or entry on a fly-leaf, margin, or similar space left blank in a book already written. [Foot-note 23: _Et icil clers qui ce trova ... Por ce qu'il est de verité, Ne l'apele mie flablel, Ne l'a pas escrit en tablel, Ainz l'a escrit en parchamin: Par bois, per plains et par chamins, Par bors, par chateals, par citez Vorra qu'il soit bien recitez._ (_OEuvres_, ed. A. Héron, Paris 1881, p. 40.)] [Foot-note 24: 'This rime was made in the wood beneath a bay-tree, where blackbird and nightingale sing and the sparrow-hawk cries. It was written on parchment for a record, and flung in the high road so that folk should find it.' _The Political Songs of England_, ed. T. Wright (London 1839), p. 236.] [Foot-note 25: A rare example of a roll made small for convenience of carrying is the British Museum Additional MS. 23986. It is about three inches wide and, in its imperfect state, twenty-two inches long, so that when rolled up it is not much bigger than one's finger. On the inside it contains a thirteenth-century _Song of the Barons_ in French (T. Wright, _Political Songs_, 1839, pp. 59 ff.); on the outside, two scenes from a Middle English farce called _Interludium de Clerico et Puella_ (Chambers, _Mediaeval Stage_, vol. ii, pp. 324 ff.) which, like so many happy experiments of the earlier time, appears to have no successor in the fourteenth century.] Most productive, though not very common in the fourteenth century, are the miscellanies of short pieces—volumes like Earl Guy's 'little red book containing many divers things'—in which early collectors noted down the scraps that interested them. A codex of West-Country origin, MS. Harley 2253 in the British Museum, preserves among French poems such as the complaint of the _Trailebastoun_, a group of English songs that includes _Lenten is Come_ and _Alysoun_. Most of its numbers are unique, and the loss of this one volume would have swept away the best part of our knowledge of the early Middle English secular lyrics. Of survival by quotation there is an example in the history of the Letter of Theodric, which lies behind Mannyng's tale of the Dancers of Colbek; and the circumstances are worth lingering over both for the number of by-paths they open to speculation, and for the glimpse they give of Wilton in a century from which there are few records of the nunnery outside the grim, tax-gatherer's entries of Domesday.