The text fragment edited below constitutes Manuscript F of the Old English Martyrology. The two text sections have been edited separately before by Heinrich Henel, and were also known to the last editor of the Old English Martyrology, Günter Kotzor, although the latter did not designate the text fragment in Harley 3271 as a distinct manuscript of the Old English Martyrology, probably because the text in Harley 3271 can indeed be interpreted as very faithful quotations from the Old English Martyrology, rather than a witness in its own right. It is, however, noteworthy that in Harley 3271 the two entries are not embedded in another text, but form two items in a longer list of short notes concerned with the topic of chronology, some of which were possibly copied by the same scribe Fa.

The possibility remains that the two short notes on the Beginning of Summer and Winter in Harley 3271 are not excerpts from the Old English Martyrology, but represent one of its sources: in theory, the martyrologist could have derived the information and wording of these entries from a set of Old English notes contained in an earlier encyclopaedic manuscript. A more plausible scenario, however, is that the martyrologist derived the information found in these entries from Bede, De temporum ratione, 35.41–51, a text which he is otherwise thought to have used for other sections concerned with chronology and cosmology; it is also important to note that no further vernacular source texts seem to have been used in the composition of the Old English Martyrology.