Transcriber’s notes:

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

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