The manuscript contains twelve quires totaling 91 folios, with sections written in English Vernacular Minuscule by three or four hands between 1060 and 1220.
Two main scribes were responsible for most of the text, working in an alternating manner and easily distinguished by the very different ways in which they wrote the symbol & (a scribal abbreviation) and the letter ð ("edh", a voiced or unvoiced dental fricative).
[3] According to Margaret Laing, the two scribes have very different backgrounds: the first is, she says, a "copier" who more or less faithfully transmits the two dialects of the two exemplars he was working from, and the second was a "'translator' whose language belongs probably in West Suffolk".
[6] The language used is not to be pinned down to any particular period, since it preserves grammatical qualities (the indirect passive, in the terminology of Cynthia Allen) that were not necessarily still current in the thirteenth century, though their use suggests that the scribes deemed them intelligible for their readership.
[7] The homilies also provide the first occurrence of a number of new words derived from Old French, including chemise and chastien ("chasten").