Transcriber’s notes:

The content of this book has been preserved in its original form as faras possible. However, because some of the scanned text was indistinctand difficult to interpret, the transcription is a ‘best guess’ insome places. The text has many anomalies with regard to punctuation,capitalisation and use of italics. The Middle English language hasarchaic uses of ‘u’ ‘v’ ‘i’ and ‘j’ as well as the long ‘s’ (replacedwith a normal ‘s’ in this transcription). In keeping with the era, thespelling is non-standard and uses space-saving contractions (equivalentto present-day use of an apostrophe to indicate omitted letters).Some of the marks denoting a contraction were indistinct, but in thistranscription all are represented by a tilde (~) above the word.The text contains many sidenotes and footnotes, some of which wereimpossible to differentiate with certainty. Three footnotes (19, 20,52) lacked identifiable anchor markers within the text, so markershave been inserted at ‘best guess’ locations and the respectivefootnotes identified with two asterisks. The footnotes have beennumbered consecutively and repositioned at the end. A short table ofcontents (that was not present in the original) has been added to thetranscription to assist readers.

The cover image of the book was created by thetranscriber and is placed in the public domain.