As Noted in the Introduction, the seven fragments contain an uninterrupted section of the narrative of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, covering (for the most part) the Battle of Trebes episode of the story. A full concordance of the section of text present in the fragments with their parallel passages in modern editions of the text is to be found in this book’s Appendix. According to Stones’s enumeration of all Lancelot-Grail manuscripts, there are thirty-two extant manuscripts containing the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. According to Trachsler’s list, however, there are thirty-one. While these lists do mostly tally, there are more discrepancies between them than just the one item suggested by this numerical difference. Specifically, Trachsler’s list includes St. Petersburg, National Library, MS fr.F.pap.xv.3 and Vatican City, Vatican Library, MS Reg. 1687 where Stones’s does not, while Stones’s list contains Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 9246, London, British Library, MS Add. 32125, and Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, MS L.iii.12, which are not listed in Trachsler’s article.

In all of the manuscripts listed by Stones as containing the Suite Vulgate, it is always preceded by the Estoire de Merlin, perhaps unsurprisingly since, as a “seamless” continuation of that very text, and one whose opening lines are never explicitly stated in any manuscript as commencing a new text, the Suite Vulgate would make little sense if copied in isolation. Additionally, in twenty-eight of the thirty-two manuscripts that Stones lists, the Estoire del saint Graal precedes the Estoire de Merlin. A varied combination of the Queste del saint Graal, La Mort le roi Artu, and the Lancelot en prose (in two cases the Lancelot is announced but not present) is found in just thirteen of the thirty-two and, in any case, the earliest manuscript to have any of these texts in addition to the Estoire del saint Graal and the Estoire de Merlin is Bonn, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 526, dated (by its scribe) to 1286. Given the likely dating of the Bristol Merlin fragments to ca. 1250–1275 (see below), therefore, the most plausible scenario is that the original manuscript that contained the fragments comprised of the Estoire del saint Graal, the Estoire de Merlin, and the Suite Vulgate.