Read "The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts" by M.R. James online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
By way of conclusion let me come back from generalities to particulars, and attempt to kindle interest and stir the imagination by a few words on waifs and strays -- the curiosities of MS. research. Some few leading instances have been mentioned, but in thinking over the collections I have examined and the documents I have had to copy or edit, others, less immediately showy, occur to my memory.
What has become of the Red Book of Eye in Suffolk? It was a copy of the Gospels which St. Felix of Burgundy, the apostle of the East Angles, brought with him in the seventh century. It was after his death in a monastery at Dunwich. Then it passed to a little priory at Eye, where Leland saw it. After the Dissolution it remained with the Corporation of Eye -- now extinct -- and people took oaths upon it. It is traceable in the records down to a comparatively late date -- within the nineteenth century. Can there be truth in the tale I have heard that it was sent for safe keeping to a mansion not far off, and there cut up for game labels? I cannot believe it.