Noting the complexity of analysing staff ruling, Thompson restricts her comments to general ones. She notes that measurements on each page of all four manuscripts indicate that ruling was done in gatherings, rather than on individual pages. For the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and the Christ Church manuscripts 510–514, Thompson notes the high degree of consistency in the rulings of both manuscripts "confirms" that they were ruled for a specific project. This is unlike Egerton 3665 and Drexel 4302 which show considerable variations in ruling not only between gatherings but even within them. This leads to Thompson's conclusion that these latter two manuscripts were not planned as unified works where the staves needed to have similar rulings. Some of their gatherings were possibly used individually and trimmed at different times which accounts for the variety in the dimensions of the margins.