British Library MS Lansdowne 388 is a composite volume formed by the convenient binding together of a number of quite unrelated smaller manuscripts of different dates. One of these (now folios 381–95) contains the unique Middle English text known as The Song of Roland. The incomplete manuscript copy has no title or running head – The Song of Roland is the title given to this fragmentary medieval poem by its first modern editor. The Catalogue of the Lansdowne Collection describes it as follows: ‘Item 21. A fragment of an old romance, in alliterative metre, on the gests of Charlemagne and Roland. It chiefly relates to the consequences of Ganelon's treachery.’ This is a fair account of the text, and it is notable that the cataloguer makes no reference to the Chanson de Roland as a source of the English poem. By contrast, the first printed edition of the fragment, which is again placed within a composite volume, now brought together with two romances from the London Thornton manuscript, presents it entirely through the lens of its status as ‘the only known English version of the celebrated Chanson de Roland’ (p. xviii). The title page of Herrtage's edition gives authenticity to the invented name by printing it in the same black-letter type and enclosed in the same quotation marks as the titles transcribed from the Thornton manuscript for the other two texts in the volume.