NLW MS 24029A (Boston Manuscript)

The complex composition of the manuscript has been mapped by archivists at the National library Wales.

[1][2] William Philips of Brecon (d.1686) and his son William (d.1721) owned the manuscript and several antiquarians including Edward Lhyud consulted it and made transcriptions in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

[3][4] William Philip's daughter Ann inherited her father's library and probably the manuscript when he died in 1721.

The manuscript was then taken to the United States, probably by Welsh settlers in the eighteenth century, and ended up in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.

[5] At some point in the later eighteenth or early nineteenth century, several leaves were lost and damage was done to the manuscript.