The Black Book of Carmarthen's content
The manuscript is made up of eight gatherings of stout vellum sewn together and bound to form a volume of 54 folios (108 pages). It is not complete for there are a number of folios missing. What strikes the eye of the reader most is the scribe's lack of uniformity, both in the way he has ruled each page before writing and in his handwriting itself, inconsistencies not generally found in manuscripts of the period written by professional scribes. He writes the first twenty folios in large letters, but from folio 21 onwards his letters are much smaller. This variance in the size of script means that the number of lines per page also varies. All this adds weight to the opinion that the scribe was working at different periods of his life. Maybe he intended to compile more than one volume, but instead the various gatherings of vellum were brought together at some stage and bound to form the book now known as the Black Book of Carmarthen.