It may initially seem odd that a chapter on books beyond England has been included in a volume of essays apparently dealing with the production of books in England. But English texts and manuscripts travelled widely in both geographical and social terms throughout this period, as, indeed, did their writers and later copyists, readers and hearers. The manuscripts that form the basis of this chapter are part of an under-investigated ‘archipelagic’ literary culture of book production, reception and reading that has been eclipsed by a larger and still imperfectly written English book history – larger, that is, because it deals with a much greater number of extant manuscripts and a greater population of Anglophone readers across a wider geographical area that includes London and Westminster – and imperfectly written (notwithstanding several modern team efforts), precisely because it is so metropolitan in focus. Not unnaturally, this larger version of English book history has gained recent critical attention because of its focus on the production and distribution of works by major English authors, revealed through metropolitan and other strongly regional patterns of consumption in England in the period before printing. Nonetheless, ‘Ireland’, ‘Scotland’ and also ‘Wales’ have always occupied significant places in the Anglophone imagination and in the late medieval ‘English’ border cultures that manifested themselves as peripheral regional presences across these islands.