The sole extant original text of John of Bordeaux is MS. 507 in the Duke of Northumberland's Library at Alnwick Castle.
[3] The MS. text, with its "two missing scenes," "confused nomenclature...and seemingly abbreviated romance plot," presents a range of problems to modern editors.
The MS. "contains one speech in the hand of Henry Chettle, obvious written to supply a lacuna...."[8] The plot of John of Bordeaux depends heavily on that of the original Friar Bacon.
Rossalin, unlike Margaret, is married, to John of Bordeaux, the commander of the Emperor's armies in his war against the Turks.
Among his other stunts, Perce gets German scholars to trade their copies of the works of Plato and Aristotle for a couple of bottles of wine.