This is a book about the voice of a sixteenth-century man; I have therefore felt it essential to present to the reader what Sir Christopher Trychay wrote, in the way that he wrote it. I have retained the Tudor spelling in all quotations (this is less difficult to understand than may appear at first glance – readers who are daunted should try reading the passages aloud, and will be surprised how often the sense clarifies itself. I offer such brave readers three clues – Sir Christopher uses ‘y’ to speak about himself, ‘I'; he uses a separate word, ‘ys', to indicate a genitive, where we now use an apostrophe s – ‘John Wode ys brother' for ‘John Wode's brother'; and he frequently uses double s or double t where we use sh or tch – ‘parysse’ for parish, ‘fett’ for ‘fetched'). But for comfort's sake, and since it is my hope that readers other than professional historians may find the story of sixteenth-century Morebath of interest, all extended quotations are followed by a modernised version, printed in italics. In shorter quotations, I have translated all hard words in square brackets, and I have translated all the Latin.
The 1904 edition of the Morebath accounts by J. Erskine Binney, while not quite complete and sometimes inconsistent in capitalisation and division of the text, is basically reliable. I have worked from the manuscript in the Devon Record Office in Exeter, but since the printed edition is the version of the accounts available to most readers of this book, I have chosen to quote from Binney's text, except in the few places (clearly indicated) where his transcription positively misleads. For those who wish to pursue them, page references to the current (but chaotic) binding of the manuscript are given immediately after the page numbers in Binney's edition.
For clarity's sake, I have provided arabic equivalents for all roman numbers, even in the Tudor text, and in translating money sums have used the modern symbols for pounds, shillings and pence. I have silently expanded all conventional abbreviations, and have very occasionally and very conservatively added punctuation to clarify specially complex passages. Following a misleading Victorian convention, Binney transcribed the obsolete letter ‘thorn’ as ‘y': I have substituted the more accurate ‘th'. The obsolete letter ‘yog', which he transcribed as ‘z', presented greater problems. There is no stable modern equivalent for Sir Christopher's somewhat erratic use of this symbol, and it never assists the sense. I have thought it simplest to omit it.
Spelling of family and place names vary greatly in the manuscript: outside direct quotation, I have opted for the spelling in the modern ordnance survey maps of Morebath, and have also used the generally current versions of family names such as ‘Hurley’ (instead of ‘Hurly'): the only exception is Sir Christopher's own surname, which I have spelt throughout as he did.
I have taken the opportunity of a fourth printing to include details of a rather startling incident on p. 164.