London, British Library, Harley MS 913 assumes a unique place in the sum of documents on which our understanding of the literary and religious culture of later medieval Ireland rests. The manuscript is without parallel there as a trilingual anthology of verse and prose, whose texts are in Latin, French, and Hiberno-English. Those in Hiberno-English comprise poems some of which originated in England and were subsequendy imported into Ireland, and many others of which were composed indigenously on Irish soil.1 These vernacular poems, as Michael Benskin has apdy observed, form 'the only substantial body of verse recognized as having been composed in the English of medieval Ireland'.2 Perhaps most famous among them is the parodie masterpiece The Land of Cokaygne.The Franciscan auspices of the manuscript admit litde doubt, and that it originated amongst the Franciscans of Waterford also seems highly likely.3 Though some earlier scholars championed the view that a number of scribes were responsible for copying it, the best current scholarly opinion holds, to the contrary, that it may actually be attributable to one principal scribe who over a period of time copied at least five (perhaps more) separate booklets which were later gathered together into a single codex; their having been copied at different periods is one of the factors that helps to account for a certain unevenness in the aspect of the script between different sections of the manuscript.4A further likely circumstance is that this principal copyist was himself a Franciscan friar who compiled his anthology perhaps in the first instance for personal use, but whose (modest) attention to layout and mise-en-page may also suggest that he had an eye to readers other than himself alone.5 There remains, however, a question to be pursued here about the date at which the booklets that comprise Harley 913 were copied. The manuscript contains internal evidence alluded to by Michael Benskin that I will press a litde further to narrow the date bands between which, or possibly a litde after which, at least one portion of the manuscript was written.6 The bands define a precise four-year period. The dating proposed below will not necessarily unsetde the dating of the manuscript as this is currendy received, but it will refine it and render its parameters more exact. Michael Benskin proposes a date f.1330 for Harley 913. Angela Lucas, in her edition of the Hiberno-English poems, has proposed c.13 30, or perhaps a litde later.7 This consensus that some time around the end of the first third of the fourteenth century saw the production of Harley 913 could conceivably be correct for certain parts of the codex, but the evidence presented here suggests that the date of at least certain of its folios, and most probably also of at least the larger part of that particular quire in which those foHos occur, should be brought forward by about a decade.Leaving aside the palaeographic and linguistic considerations, which by their nature cannot be used to fix a date precisely, two internal pieces of evidence need to be considered. One is found in a set of French proverbs which on fol. I5V are attributed to the Earl of Desmond. The first earl, Maurice fitz Thomas FitzGerald, received his title in 1329, providing a terminus post quern for the copying of this particular part of the manuscript.8 A second piece of internal evidence, on fols 41-3, permits the fixing of termini both post and ante quern for the particular part in which it appears. It is found in a Hst in Latin that enumerates the conventual houses of the Franciscan friars, along with those of the Poor Clares, the 'second order' founded for female reHgious between 121 2 and 1 214 by St Clare and St Francis. The Hst is comprehensive, and reports the current diaspora throughout the world of the Franciscan order. By the time it was compiled, the order had travelled widely afield from its place of origin in Italy, and had estabHshed houses in many regions and countries, aUowing the Hst's author to conclude with a flourish, a grand Summa locorum tocius ordinis ultramontane as well as cisalpine. …