Our study of the Bristol Merlin has yielded several conclusions that have each been presented in the preceding chapters, but which are worthwhile reiterating briefly here. The manuscript that once contained our fragments was likely composed in northern (possibly northeastern) France ca. 1250–1275, and is likely to have also contained other Lancelot-Grail Cycle texts—almost certainly at least the Estoire del saint Graal and the Estoire de Merlin. That manuscript carried the α redaction of the Suite Vulgate, indicating that the Estoire de Merlin that would have accompanied it would also have been α. The fragments attest a version of the α redaction that does not differ substantially from that in other α manuscripts (the closest textual sibling being MS fr. 344), except in one respect. Sexual connotations in the exchange between Merlin and Viviane appear to have been toned down, being even more family-friendly in the Bristol Merlin than in the other manuscripts that are very close textual siblings.

A reader annotation suggests that the Bristol Merlin manuscript was probably in England by the early fourteenth century. The location of the manuscript’s medieval “home” in England remains uncertain, but seems likely to have been with a private owner, who might have subsequently donated it to a religious house, probably in the vicinity of either Oxford or Cambridge. Alternatively, and owing to some of its less than lavish characteristics and its unexecuted decoration, the book might have served, from its earliest days, as an exemplar in the (English) book trade.

Wherever it was once housed, by the late-fifteenth to early-sixteenth century its owner had discarded the book for unknown reasons, possibly for a nominal sum, to a bookbinder in either Oxford or Cambridge for recycling into new bindings. Assuming it was not due to a more arbitrary matter, the timing might suggest two possible reasons for this disposal: the recent availability of printed copies of (French) Arthurian texts and/or the likelihood that Arthurian texts in Old French (especially in England) were becoming “outdated” after, and perhaps as a result of, the composition and circulation of Malory’s Morte Darthur. The receiving binder then broke the manuscript down into quires and used some of its leaves for pastedowns in the bindings he made for a set of four volumes containing the complete works of Jean Gerson, which had probably been imported unbound from Strasbourg by one of his customers.