Babel MS 11

The two strips known of this manuscript come from one folio, one fragment providing a cutting nearly the whole width of the folio, the other picking up the text a couple of lines later and providing the bottom section of one column. The amount of text absent between the bottom of the verso of fragment ii and the top of the second column of fragment i recto reveals that this must have been an imposingly large volume, of which we have parts of only the bottom third of a folio. Its size also suggests that this is likely to have been a substantial collection of saints' lives. There is something fortuitous, though, about what little survives in these Colchester fragments, considering that the passages preserved from the Life of St Judas Cyriacus mention St Helena, the town's most famous daughter.