The Roman de Brut was by far the most successful of Wace's works. Over thirty manuscripts have survived containing all or part of the poem, and further fragments continue to come to light; one was discovered as recently as 1999. A full list of these manuscripts is provided by Judith Weiss in the introduction to her edition and translation of the work. Nineteen of the manuscript witnesses (eighteen of these being medieval) preserve a complete, or near-complete, text. Interest in the poem was especially great in England, as might be expected: nine of the nineteen complete or near-complete texts, and seven of the thirteen fragments known at this date, are in Anglo-Norman (A-N) manuscripts (or scraps thereof). However, it also follows from these figures that as far as we can tell, over half of the medieval manuscripts of the Roman de Brut were copied in Continental France (Cont.). The phenomenon was not exclusively an English one, by far. The oldest of the surviving manuscripts is Durham Cathedral Library, C iv 27, an Anglo-Norman copy dated to the end of the twelfth century; one of the extremely fragmentary fragments kept in Oxford (Bodleian, Rawl. D 913) was also originally part of a manuscript copied in the late twelfth century. Some fifteen of the extant manuscripts (eight of which are Anglo-Norman) were copied in the thirteenth century; nine of these are complete or near-complete. Ten date from the late thirteenth/fourteenth century, six of them Anglo-Norman; five of the ten are complete or near-complete. Three manuscripts date back to the fifteenth century, all copied on the French Continent, and all preserving a full text; and finally, a copy was made in the eighteenth century of one of the fourteenth-century texts, Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève 2447 (a Continental copy).

The scarcity of twelfth-century manuscripts is not really surprising, if only because Wace's work appears to have been used as a historical textbook by its earlier Anglo-Norman readers,5 and such books have always suffered from wear and tear.