The most important evidence for the formation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in the early Middle Ages is their extant manuscripts and witnesses that testify to now-lost versions. Seven manuscript versions of the Chronicle survived from the Middle Ages into the early modern period. Not all have survived to the present day complete. Since 1848 each of these has been known by one of the first eight letters of the alphabet (A–G); to these have since been added the single leaf fragment H and I, a set of Easter Table annals extending from 988 to 1268, discussed in the following chapter. The manuscript of the G text, made at the beginning of the eleventh century, was largely destroyed in the Cotton Library fire of 1731. The same fire at Ashburnham House caused the leaves of the B manuscript to shrink. The D version was already missing a number of folios (probably two quires, covering the years 261–693) by the sixteenth century. Remarkably, the surviving manuscript copies of the Chronicle come very close to encompassing its life as a text in early medieval England: A's Scribe 1 wrote his annals c.900, about a decade after the common stock entered circulation c.892; the final entries in E were made in the mid-1150s at Peterborough, after which no version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was continued. The first section of this chapter first describes these manuscripts and identifies their scribes, many of whom also appear in later chapters where their roles in the making of the Chronicles are discussed in further detail.