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The following is a passage from one of our texts (11), St Erkenwald lines 257–64: first, as it appears in the one surviving manuscript copy; then, as it would appear in a ‘diplomatic’ or letter‐by‐letter transcription; and finally, as it appears in our edited version.

Lines from St Erkenwald (MS Harley 2250, folio 74v).

Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

	ye bisshop baythes h ʒet wt bale at his hert
be, c to paf	yagh mē menskid h so how hit myʒt worthe
	yt his clothes we so clene in cloutes me thynkes
	hom burde haue rotid & bene rent ra lon sythe
∵	yi body may be enbawmyd hit bashis me noght
	yt hit thar ryne ne rote ne no ronke wormes
	bot yi colou ne yi clothe I know no wise
	how hit myʒt lye by mōnes lo & last so longe

þe bisshop baythes hym ʒet with bale at his hert,

þagh men menskid him so, how hit myʒt worthe

þat his clothes were so clene. ‘In cloutes, me thynkes,

Hom burde have rotid and bene rent in rattes long sythen. 260

þi body may be enbawmyd, hit bashis me noght

þat hit thar ryne no rote ne no ronke wormes;

Bot þi coloure ne þi clothe – I know in no wise

How hit myʒt lye by monnes lore and last so longe.’

We ignore the early‐modern hand which has marked worthe and rattes with underlining, and glossed the former (correctly) ‘be, com to pas’, although such annotations have their own interest as testifying to post‐medieval study of Middle English texts. The original is written in a late fifteenth‐century hand. As was common at the time, the scribe uses a y shape for both y and þ, but we distinguish them: þe for ye (257), but myʒt (258). He also writes u for modern v in the middle of words (haue 260), but our practice is to ‘normalize’ this. We expand the abbreviation for and. The line over vowels indicates either m or n, and has been represented accordingly: hym (257), men (258), in (260, 263), monnes (264); but that over þagh (258) has been ignored, though it might be expanded, as by other editors, to (unetymological) ‐e. The ‐es abbreviation has been expanded in rattes (260), as have the customary short forms of with (257) and þat (259, 262). A final upward curl is taken to represent ‐e after r (were 259, coloure 263, lore 264), but not after other letters (long sythen 260). Editors differ in their practice on this point.

Line 262 presents editorial problems of a fairly typical kind. The scribe himself went wrong, correcting route to rote. Earlier in the line, some editors read ryue, that is, ryve, ‘tear asunder’; but, u being indistinguishable from n, we prefer to read ryne, ‘touch’. In either case, anyway, the line hardly makes sense as it stands: ‘[Your body may be embalmed, so it does not surprise me] that it need not touch/tear nor rot nor any foul worms’. We have therefore emended the first ne to no, assuming an error easily made by the scribe. This emendation turns rote into the noun ‘rot’ and makes it the subject of ryne – which is accordingly more appropriate than ryve, since rot can touch but hardly tear. So the line, in our version, means: ‘that no rot need touch it, nor any foul worms’. The word‐order object–verb–subject is common in Middle English verse.

The passage also illustrates the difficulties and responsibilities that face editors as they punctuate their texts. Most Middle English verse is not punctuated at all, as in the case of St Erkenwald, or has nothing but metrical punctuation such as marks the half‐lines in alliterative poems. So all punctuation in modern editions should be treated with scepticism, as representing nothing more authoritative than an editor’s judgement of the syntax and meaning of the original. Modern habits of punctuation, furthermore, are in many respects ill‐suited to the fluid and often colloquial structure of medieval sentences. Thus, the enclosing of the first half of line 258 between commas tends to disguise the fact that it belongs inside the clause that follows: ‘The bishop asks him further with anguish in his heart how it could be that, even though people had honoured him so, his clothes were so perfectly preserved’. Again, line 259 should slip into direct speech more easily than it does in our text, where modern punctuation has required a heavy stop, an inverted comma, and a capital letter. The comma after enbawmyd (261) is a deliberate underpointing, designed to keep the line and the sentence moving; but the awkwardly overemphatic dash in line 263 seems the only way of representing a usage hardly permissible in modern written English: coloure and clothe announce the subject of myʒt lye in the next line, to be recapitulated there by the pronoun hit (see 5.10).

Elsewhere in our texts, editorial punctuating involves more far‐reaching decisions about meaning. An extreme example, and one where the present editors have not been able to agree a solution, is presented by the opening lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (text 9 here). These appear as follows, without any punctuation, in the sole manuscript:

Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye

þe borʒ brittened and brent to brondez and askez

þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroʒt

Watz tried for his tricherie þe trewest on erthe

Hit watz Ennias þe athel and his highe kynde 5

þat siþen depreced provinces and patrounes bicome

Welneʒe of al þe wele in þe west iles

The question of interpretation at its most basic is: who is the tulk of line 3? Two answers have been proposed.

1 The tulk is Antenor who, according to well‐known accounts of the fall of Troy, betrayed the city to the Greeks. The opening sentence is built round a correlative pair of siþens, at lines 1 and 6: ‘After the siege and the assault of Troy were over, the city destroyed and burned to brands and ashes, … it was the noble Aeneas and his great descendants who after‐wards subjugated nations …’. On this reading, the Hit watz of line 5 points forward to what follows. Lines 3–4 are left as a parenthesis; and they should accordingly be set off by dashes: ‘– the man [Antenor] who carried out the treasonable schemes was famous for his treachery, the most notable on earth –’.

2 The tulk is Aeneas. Aeneas, according to the Troy story, at first conspired with Antenor to betray the city; but then he rescued the Trojan princess Polyxena from the clutches of the victorious Greeks. This further act of treachery, this time to the new masters of the city, was revealed to the Greeks who then exiled Aeneas from Troy. On this reading, the Hit watz of line 5 refers back to the tulk, identifying him as Aeneas, and so is best preceded by a colon at the end of line 4. Line 3 refers to the treason of Aeneas in betraying Troy; line 4 to his noble treachery in rescuing Polyxena: Aeneas ‘was exposed for his treachery, the most honourable on earth’.

Since the two present editors do not agree on this matter, and since in any case the issues would not have been as clear‐cut for a medieval reader or listener, we have adopted in our text a light and non‐committal punctuation.