Historians faced a lot of difficulties while using manuscripts because:
- There was no printing press in the 13th and 14th centuries. Scribes in those days made manuscripts by hand.
- To copy was not an easy exercise. Scribes could not read the handwriting of the other writers.
- They were forced to guess. So there were small but significant differences in the copy of the scribed.
- These small words or sentences here and there grew over centuries of copying.
- The manuscripts of the same text became a great extent different from the original.