Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber’s Note: This e-text includes characters that will only display in UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding, including but not limited to: Ȝ, ȝ (yogh) ⁊ (Tironian ampersand) þ̵ (thorn with stroke--also see below) ę (e with tail, “e caudata”) ẏ (y with over-dot) All but the first three are rare, or occur only in notes. If any of these characters do not display properly, or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the Latin-1 version of this file instead. The form {} represents a half-width space, generally between prefix and main word. These are not always unambigous; readers should consult page images or a printed text. The {;} is a punctuation mark similar to a semicolon. Note that because of font availability, “thorn with stroke” is shown as separate characters, þ or Þ with combining -. If your text reader can display the single-character forms Ꝥ and ꝥ (hex A764 and A765), feel free to replace them globally. A few selections use additional, very unusual letters that will be explained as they appear. In the last three selections, doubled ¶¶ represents the large C-like paragraph symbol. In Orm and earlier selections, ¶ is as printed. Italicized letters or parts of words, indicating expanded abbreviations, are shown in {braces}. Spaced-out text, used mainly for Latin quotations, is marked with _lines_. Boldface is shown with +marks+, while large initial capitals are shown with double ++marks before the letter. Superscript letters are shown with ^. The Notes were published in a separate volume, in preparation at the time this e-text was produced (August 2008). For each selection, the bracketed paragraph describing the MSS. has been summarized from these Notes; additions or omissions shown by ellipses or brackets according to the usual rules for academic quotation. Further details about the format of this e-text are at the end of the text. All notes in [[double brackets]] were added by the transcriber.] SELECTIONS FROM EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH 1130-1250 Edited With Introductions And Notes by JOSEPH HALL M.A., Hon. D.Litt., Durham University PART I: TEXTS OXFORD At The Clarendon Press M CM XX OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS London Edinburgh Glasgow New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town Bombay _HUMPHREY MILFORD_ Publisher to the University PREFACE