But one manuscript of the Poema del Cid is known, the handiwork of a certain Per or Pedro the Abbot. About the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Sanchez, the royal librarian, was led to suspect through certain bibliographical references that such a manuscript might exist in the neighbourhood of Bivar, the birthplace of the hero of the poem, and he succeeded in unearthing it in that village. The date at the end is given as Mille CCXLV, and authorities are not agreed as to its significance, some holding that a vacant space showing an erasure after the second C is intentional, and that it should read 1245 (1207 new style). Others believe that 1307 is the true date of the MS. However that may be, the poem itself is referred to a period not earlier than the middle of the twelfth nor later than the middle of the thirteenth century. As we possess it, the manuscript is in a rather mutilated and damaged condition. The commencement and title are lost, a page in the middle is missing, and the end has been sadly patched by an unskilful hand. Sanchez states, in his Poesías Castellanas anteriores al Siglo XV (1779-90) that he had seen a copy made in 1596 which showed that the MS. had the same deficiencies then as now. Its Authorship Unknown The personality of the author of the Poema del Cid will probably for ever remain unknown. He may have been a churchman, as Ormsby suggests, but I am inclined to the opinion that he was a professional trovador. The trouvères, rather than ecclesiastics, were responsible for such works in France, and why not the trovadores in Spain? [26] That the writer lived near the time of the events he celebrated is plain, probably about half a century after the Cid sheathed his famous sword Colada for the last time. On the ground of various local allusions in the poem he has been claimed as a native of the Valle de Arbujuelo and as a monk of the monastery of Cardeña, near Burgos. But these surmises have nothing but textual references to recommend them, and are only a little more probable than that which would make him an Asturian because he does not employ the diphthong ue. We have good grounds, however, for the assumption that he was at least a Castilian, and these are to be found in his fierce political animus against the kingdom of Leon and all that pertained to it. That Pedro the Abbot was merely a copyist is clear from his mishandling of the manuscript; for though we have to thank him for the preservation of the Poema, our gratitude is dashed with irritation at the manner in which he has passed it on to us, for his copy is replete with vain repetitions, he frequently runs two lines into one, and occasionally even transfers the matter of one line to another in his haste to be free of his task. Other Cantares of the Cid