I have argued in the preceding chapter that many of our ideas concerning what constitutes a formula and what constitutes a formulary need reappraising with greater sensitivity to the manuscript evidence. This chapter will go through the reconstructed collections to develop these conclusions in greater detail, and show what impact they have on the corpus. For ease of reference I have by and large followed the order of the collections as they appear in Zeumer's edition, though I do not always agree with his datings; I did, however, make an exception in the case of the collections drawn from manuscripts associated with Marculf, since I think it unhelpful to discuss them separately. I have included a reference table outlining the links between the different collections and between the different manuscripts at the end of this chapter (Table 6, p. 163), descriptions of the principal manuscripts cited in this chapter are set out in the appendix at the end of this volume. Much of what follows will inevitably be critical of Zeumer's edition, and I should stress at this point that it is far from my intention to belittle his work. Zeumer did us a great service when he applied his considerable intellectual powers to the study of formulae, and it is always possible to pick holes in any project as ambitious as his.