In the Marquess of Bath's library at Longleat House, Warminster, is a small volume of 95 folios, now MS 253, whose medieval title appears to have been ‘The book of knyghthode’. It is best known to scholars for its inclusion (on fols. 2–75v) of a copy of the translation of Christine de Pizan'sEpistre d'Othea made probably round about 1440 by Stephen Scrope (c.1396–1472) for his stepfather Sir John Fastolf (1380–1459), a text edited from this manuscript in 1904 by Sir George Warner, and collated by Curt F. Bühler for his 1970 Early English Text Society edition, which was based on the copy in Cambridge, St John's College H. 5. Accompanying The Epistle of Othea, on fols. 76r–95v of MS Longleat 253, is a work that has received much less attention: in Warner's words, it is ‘An English poem or series of poems, probably also translated from the French, in which love is compared with the growth of a tree.’ This work was not included in Carleton Brown's and Rossell Hope Robbins's Index of Middle English Verse, and only vaguely outlined in the Supplement to this, in which it features as entry *3553.8: ‘A poem to his mistress likening her to a tree in various seasons – about twenty folios; first leaf missing.’ No folio numbers are given, no reference to an edition, no description of verse form.