Editorial Conventions

In the interest of ensuring an edition as representative of the manuscript as possible I have kept the letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ and ‘i’ and ‘j’ as the scribe wrote them. Throughout the manuscript, the various scribes have used ‘y’ to represent ‘i’, ‘y’ or ‘Þ’, (the ‘th’ sound). When the letter represents ‘i’ or ‘y’, it has been left as written. In place of ‘Þ’, ‘th’ has been transcribed. The Old English letter ‘З’ has been transcribed as ‘y’, except in some cases where ‘z’ is clearly intended, e.g. ‘zodiac’.

Abbreviations have been expanded and the expansions underlined. Where a flourish or mark is present and is arguably intended as an abbreviation mark, but cannot be satisfactorily expanded, it is represented by an apostrophe. Numerals are given in either Roman or Arabic forms, as in the manuscript. In Roman numerals the final ‘j’ is retained to denote the end of a number.

During the period in which the manuscript was written, punctuation was not standardised. I have not modernised it except where symbols or scribal marks are used to separate clauses. Throughout Egerton 2572, capital letters are employed as a means of punctuation, they have been retained. Letters that are possibly, but not clearly, capitals – a particular difficulty with ‘w’ – are transcribed as lower case. In some instances, the scribe has used a red tint over a letter; such cases have been transcribed as capitals. The scribes’ use of the period, ‘.’, has been repeated. Symbols of a decorative nature have been retained where they serve an organisational function and are represented by an asterisk, ‘*’, with the first example footnoted where appropriate.

Headings, side-headings and some key words are written in a bold gothic script; this has been printed in bold type. I have retained the scribe's word division and paragraph breaks. Line breaks have not been retained unless they represent the organisation of the information on the page or ease use of the edition. Blank folios and those containing images are not recorded; for reference to these, see the appendix.