THIS PAPER CONCERNS books written in England in the centuries before Chaucer; it considers some of the current trends in our understanding of manuscript production from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. It represents ideas and questions which I formed during my work on two projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which catalogued manuscripts from very different points on the medieval chronological spectrum. On the one hand, ‘The Production and Use of English Manuscripts: 1060 to 1220’ project (EM Project) deals with manuscripts containing English texts that were copied between the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the thirteenth century; on the other, the ‘Manuscripts of the West Midlands’ project (MWM Project) has catalogued manuscripts linguistically localisable to the West Midlands and datable to the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. Working on these projects brought a realisation that there is scope for more detailed study of the production of medieval manuscripts containing English from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. A perusal, for instance, of the electronic catalogue of the MWM Project and the manuscripts available in the EM Project offers an impressive collection of data, which includes the incipits and explicits of texts, palaeographical and codicological information, and art-historical observations. However, one is left to wonder what these data are telling us about the production and the use of these books and the transmission of medieval texts. What is the picture that these resources paint? It is certainly a complex scenario with several missing components, which, however, we can start to put together by questioning the available evidence. Information about the textual content of the majority of these manuscripts is readily available in numerous indexes of medieval verse and prose, and various editions which have appeared over the years, but more work needs to be done on the manuscripts and their respective physical contexts. These contexts would provide further evidence for an assessment of the circumstances that effected and affected the transmission of English texts, and offer a better understanding of the intricate matrix of medieval book production. There is still much mystery surrounding the origins of many manuscripts, their mode of production, and who wrote them, and for whom.