One assumes that when, around the end of the tenth century or the beginning of the eleventh, somewhere in the south-west of England, the scribe began what was probably the last stint on his manuscript of medical recipes, he did not guess that it would remain in use for over six hundred years – more or less until it came into the hands of Reverend Robert Burscough, who, passing it on to his friend Humphrey Wanley, transformed it from a practical text into an object of scholarship. His parchment stiff, his script functional and the finished codex portable, the scribe was making a practical reference work for day-to-day use. Having already copied the Old English Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, he was concluding a large, miscellaneous collection of medical texts, known since Cockayne's edition as Lācnunga (‘remedies’). One wonders whether, having reproduced the conventional prose direction ‘Wið fǣrstice feferfuige ד sēo rēade netele ðe þurh ærn inwyxð ד wegbrāde wyll in būteran’ (‘For a violent, stabbing pain: feverfew and the “red nettle” [L. Lamium purpureum] that grows through the ?corn, and plantain. Boil in butter’), he registered any surprise as he proceeded to copy a long metrical charm on to folios 175–6v. It has, at any rate, intrigued and challenged scholars since the nineteenth century: