This manuscript is the first part of a volume that was divided in two before the mid-16^th century. The second part is in Winchester Cathedral (MS14). The College’s manuscript begins (fols 1–111) with the Diadema monachorum (‘The Crown of Monks’) by Smaragdus, a Benedictine monk and abbot of St Mihiel near Verdun in the early 9^th century. The Diadema monachorum is a set of one hundred chapters of rules and guidance for ascetic monks.

This is followed by the lives of the early Christian saints of Egypt, often referred to as the Desert Fathers. The manuscript ends mid-sentence, and continues in the Cathedral’s volume. In monasteries, the lives were regularly read aloud at meal times, and in Winchester College’s Statutes, William of Wykeham directs that the ‘Vitras Patrum’ (lives of the fathers) be read in the hall when members of the College dined together. It is conceivable that this manuscript was bought, or perhaps borrowed, from Winchester Cathedral Priory specifically for this purpose. The companion volume still at the Cathedral has a title at the top of its first leaf added in a mid-16^th-century hand, and so provides evidence that the volume had already been divided by that time. As with a number of other books in the Fellows’ Library, including MS22, the manuscript may have originally come from Hyde Abbey.

Literature: Edward Bernard, Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti, Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1697), p. 31, no. 1352; Walter Oakeshott, ‘Winchester College Library Before 1750’, The Library, vol. IX. no. 1 (1954), pp. 1–16, 15, no. 1; Neil R. Ker and Alan J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, Volume IV: Paisley–York (Oxford, 1969), pp. 614–16; Walter Oakeshott, ‘The Matter of Malory’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 (1977), p. 193; Paul Yeats-Edwards, Winchester College (Warden and Fellows’ Library) Medieval Manuscript Collection: Brief History and Catalogue (London, 1978), pp. 5–6; Walter Oakeshott and Barbara Carpenter Turner, The Winchester Bible and the Winchester Cathedral Manuscript Collection (London, 1984), pp. 9–10.

Provenance: Probably Hyde Abbey and then Winchester Cathedral Priory; at Winchester College by 1652, though possibly much earlier.

Location: Fellows’ Library