Scope and Contents: This item consists primarily of 11 pages of extracts from the 15th-century English poem Sowdon of Babylon, copied by George Steevens in the latter half of the 18th century. The final extract, written on a separate piece of paper and pasted onto the manuscript, may be in a different hand. The manuscript previously belonged to Richard Heber (no. 1457) and Sir Thomas Phillipps (no. 8332).
Walter Wilson Greg purchased the extracts, by then bound into a contemporary volume, in 1897; he added a brief preface with information on their provenance to one of the newer pages.