It is time to turn from the people in Sheale's life and the various economies in which he worked to a very different kind of evidence, that provided by the manuscript that contains his songs, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 48. The manuscript is described by W. H. Black in his catalogue as ‘a small quarto volume consisting of 141 leaves of paper of the XVIth century by different hands, and containing a collection of miscellaneous pieces of old English minstrelsy’. This description evokes both the manuscript's particular fascination as a possible minstrel's songbook and something of the challenge of recreating its history, for it is indeed the work of different hands and these hands are not always easily distinguished nor is the shape of their collaboration readily deciphered. It was not until 1997 that Michael Chesnutt provided an accurate account of all the hands in the manuscript; previous discussion, including even that of the great ballad expert Hyder E. Rollins, had been largely based on the extremely misleading edition that Thomas Wright offered the Roxburghe Club in 1860.

The very thought of holding in one's hand a minstrel's manuscript conjures up the tantalizing possibility of direct access to the lost oral world, of reading the very words the minstrel spoke, the words the audience heard. This is presumably one reason that Wright judged it worth editing the contents, for minstrels fascinated him.