Note 25 — INTRODUCTION

A rare example of a roll made small for convenience of carrying is the British Museum Additional MS. 23986. It is about three inches wide and, in its imperfect state, twenty-two inches long, so that when rolled up it is not much bigger than one's finger. On the inside it contains a thirteenth-century Song of the Barons in French (T. Wright, Political Songs, 1839, pp. 59 ff.); on the outside, two scenes from a Middle English farce called Interludium de Clerico et Puella (Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, vol. ii, pp. 324 ff.) which, like so many happy experiments of the earlier time, appears to have no successor in the fourteenth century.