Transcriber’s notes: In this transcription, paired _underscores_ denote _italicised text_ and a ^ (caret) indicates that the next character was superscripted in the original text. Footnotes are located at the end of the book. The cover image of the book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. Potential problems: The text contains numerous foreign and uncommon typographic characters. In addition to Greek, there are passages of Hebrew and Arabic text (which read from right-to-left and are normally right justified) that will not necessarily display correctly with all devices. The book is most easily read with a browser using the HTML version of the transcription. If some of the characters look abnormal, first ensure that the ‘character encoding’ of your device/browser is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You might also need to change the default font. Standard fonts such as Times New Roman, Georgia or Lucida Sans Unicode are sometimes adequate, but it might be necessary to use a less-common font such as Arial Unicode MS, DejaVu, Segoe UI Symbol or FreeSerif to see all characters correctly. Right alignment of the Hebrew and Arabic paragraphs will generally only be apparent with a monospaced font such as DejaVuSansMono. Some diacritics don’t display consistently. For example, the Greek letter υ̑ occurs in several words and with some browsers and fonts the inverted breve is displaced towards the following letter; the same anomaly occurs with macrons above letters in some old English words. The Hebrew passage contains several letters with single or double overhead dots (of uncertain significance) that can’t be replicated on screen – the HTML version has a hyperlinked image of the original for anyone wishing to see it. Roman numerals are widely used and often in archaic ways. Numerals followed by an italicised _l_, _s_, or _d_ indicate monetary values in imperial pounds shillings and pence units, e.g. xxxiii_l_. vi_s_. viii_d_. represents 33 pounds 6 shillings 8 pence (a space sometimes separates the numeral from the unit). The last ‘i’ (‘one’) in a roman numeral was often represented by the letter ‘j’; hence iiij_d_ is equivalent to 4 pence, and ‘ij holownesses’ should be read as ‘two holownesses’. Numerous portions of text enclosed within square brackets were inserted by the author (not the transcriber) for clarification or translation, as were several (sic) entries in the Hebrew and Arabic texts.