[split] Could the manuscript be a copy of older documents?

[davidjackson]

Koen:
Well, most of the elaborately illuminated manuscripts we study were made for rich patrons and cared for in libraries. This is why they survived and we can still see them. But the VM is described by the Beinecke library as a work in "provincial" style, which means that it does not appear to have been made in a major scholarly centre. Manuscripts made for kings, and copies of those manuscripts, were much more likely to survive than any "provincial" works.

Sorry, that just isn't true. Christopher de Hamel estimates that there are "upwards of a million medieval manuscripts" known and catalogued, and that's without tax records, government paperwork, notorial records and personal archives.