Writing in 1911, Rupert Taylor remarked that political prophecy ‘as a type of English literature’ had, as yet, received little attention. He noted that there had been editions and studies of particular texts, but there had been no work on political prophecy in general. Many texts were still unedited, in manu- script form only, and therefore were not readily available to the majority of students and scholars. Taylor set out to remedy this situation himself, and the resulting book became, and still remains, the standard background work on political prophecy in medieval England. It has to be recognized that Taylor was a pioneer in this field, the first scholar to identify political prophecy as having a form and a purpose distinct from other species of historical writing. On the other hand, the continued reliance upon Taylor's book as the ultimate reference for political prophecy in England is unfor- tunate, as his work can now be seen to contain some fatal flaws. Taylor studied the syntax of the texts, but was chiefly interested in their imagery and symbolism. This gave the impression, shared by other scholars before and since, that prophecy was a kind of code, or puzzle-language, put together by the initiated, in order that other initiated persons might then decipher it. Writing sixty years after Taylor, Basil Clarke said of the prophecies in the Vita Merlini, ‘they can be tedious, apart from the interest of the form itself. There is a cryptographic attraction in trying to identify references to current and earlier personalities and events’.