Ye = yea, p. 14. 
Yeld = yield, p. 21.

Early English Text Society.

Report of the Committee, January, 1865.

The close of the first year of the Society’s operations affords the Committee the welcome opportunity of congratulating the members on the Society’s success.  Instead of two Texts, which the first Circular to the Society suggested might perhaps be issued, the Committee have been enabled to publish four, and these four such as will bear comparison, as to rareness and intrinsic value, with the publications of any of the longest established societies of the kingdom.  The Arthur was edited for the first time from a unique MS., wholly unknown to even the latest writers on the subject, and exhibits our national hero’s life in a simpler form than even Geoffrey of Monmouth, or Layamon.  The Early English Alliterative Poems, though noticed long ago by Dr. Guest and Sir F. Madden, for their great philological and poetical value, had been inaccessible to all but students of the difficult and faded MS. in the British Museum:  they have been now made public by the Society’s edition, with their large additions to our vocabulary, and their interesting dialectal formations.  The Sir Gawayne, from the same MS., could only have been had before in Sir Frederick Madden’s rare and costly edition, printed by the Bannatyne Club.  And the Lauder has restored, as it were, to Scotland, a Poet whose name had found no place in the standard History of Scottish Poetry, and the Biographical Dictionaries.

Though the Society started late in the past year, these four Texts were published within a fortnight of its close; and before that time the first Text for the second year was in the printer’s hands.  The Committee pledge themselves to continue their exertions to render the Texts issued worthy of the Society, and to complete the issue of each set within the year assigned to it.  They rely with confidence on the Subscribers to use their best endeavours to increase the list of Members, in order that funds may not be wanting to print the material that editors place at their service.  The aim of the Committee is, on the one hand, to print all that is most valuable of the yet unprinted MSS. in English, and, on the other, to re-edit and reprint all that is most valuable in printed English books, which from their scarcity or price are not within the reach of the student of moderate means.[6] Those relating to KING ARTHUR will be the Committee’s first care; those relating to our Language and its Dialects the second; while in due proportion with these, will be mixed others of general interest, though with no one special common design.  The Committee hope that no year will pass without the issue of one Text in the Northern dialect, as well in acknowledgment of the support that the Society has received in Scotland, as to obviate the hitherto limited circulation of the works of the early Scotch writers among students south of the Humber.