[52]. þe—hefden, lit. whom they thought that they had any property. For this periphrasis comp. 119/58, 9; ‘breðren ꝥ he hefde iherd ꝥ weren of muche speche,’ AR 74/9. The subject of the dependent verb is not expressed.
[53]. efter, with an eye to, to extort; a use mostly with verbs of pursuit or desire, but comp. 60/12, 118/28. See Round, 214 note for instances of these extortions.
[54]. pining, notwithstanding the scribe’s punctuation, is a cognate acc. to pined; with the adj. it is practically equal to unutterably; comp. 8/108.
[55]. Comp. ‘Sumne hi onhengon be þan fotum ⁊ sumne be þan earmum,’ AS. Hom., ed. Assmann, 171/36. After henged the object heom is omitted as being the subject of the previous verb.
[58]. to ð, to the extent that, so far that, so that. OE. to þon þæt.
[60]. crucethus, torture house: the first element is L. cruciatus. Comp. ‘Heo deden heo in quarterne; in ane quale-huse,’ L 3769; ‘þis meiden wes bicluset | þe hwile in cwarterne | ⁊ i cwalmhuse,’ SK 600.
[62]. him . . . þe limes, his limbs. Emphatic is ‘þat his ribbes him to brake,’ KH 1077. lof ⁊ grim: the passage is corrupt: grī may be grin or grim; lof can only be for loþ, as Thorpe suggests in his translation, ‘loathly and grim,’ as if two adjectives for the name of the contrivance. Possibly grine has dropped out after grī; the words are associated in ‘Forðon he me alysde of laðum grine’ = ‘Quoniam ipse liberavit me de laqueo,’ Paris Psalter, xc. 3. But more probably the scribe has heard indistinctly an unfamiliar word such as, wæron loþ engins. It is true that engine, device, machine does not appear in English till 1300, but it is found in Anglo-Norman books in the last half of the twelfth century, and it must have come to England with the castle.
[63]. rachenteges, chains, fetters; but the gloss collario racentege (Napier, 2062) is noteworthy in the present connexion. ð . . . onne, one of which.
[64]. This may mean, ‘That was adjusted in this way, namely it is fastened,’ &c., but it is not clear. Perhaps it has been lost before is. The contrivance must have resembled that described in Reade’s It is Never too Late to Mend, ch. xi.
[66]. bæron: supply sculde out of myhte.