Until recently, the late Old English poem Durham was known to have beencopied in two manuscripts of the twelfth century: Cambridge, UniversityLibrary, Ff. 1. 27 (C) and London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xx (V). Chas been transcribed frequently and serves as the basis for Elliott Van KirkDobbie's standard edition of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. Vwas almost completely destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731. Its version isknown to us solely from George Hickes's 1705 edition (H).

In a recent article, however, Donald K. Fry announced the discovery of a thirdmedieval text of the poem. Like V, the original manuscript of this ‘third’ versionis now lost and can be reconstructed only from an early modern transcription - inthis case a copy by Francis Junius no win the Stanford University Library (StanfordUniversity Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Misc. 010 [J1]). Unlike V,however, Junius's copy is our only record of this manuscript's existence. No othertranscripts are known from medieval or early modern manuscript catalogues.