How this website works

The entirety of the Deeds has been uploaded to this website, here.

In addition to the main body of the text, the left sidebar provides a list of all main sections and component parts of the Deeds, each of which has been assigned a label.  These labels serve not only to indicate each of the distinct texts that comprise the Deeds, but also to facilitate the display of their interrelationships.  

As one scrolls over the text, individual blocks of text and its labels are both highlighted. Clicking on a highlighted block of text, either in the main body of the Deeds or in a subordinate section, will also display its assigned labels in the right margin.  Clicking on a section or component label from either location will extract that unit of text from the whole, at which point a sidebar in the right margin offers analysis.  

Note that most blocks of texts have more than one label, in order to facilitate a nested display. The highest order of labels, in many cases, distinguishes not a component text but a section of the Deeds comprised of many components. Thus, clusters of intersecting components may be displayed together and then broken down further.  The vast majority of identifiable components appear only in a specific section; a few crosscut the entire text. 

The whole of the Deeds is highlighted in various colors, in order to render immediately visible the shift between components. However, more component parts exist than suitable highlighting colors. Rather than assigning a unique color to each component, we allocate five among all the parts to represent their function within the text.

Yellow indicates core components, i.e., narrative units composed as such, whether short or long.

Green is used for glosses, comments, and insertions providing additional information on the core texts, by definition post-dating them. Short, most of these probably originated as marginal notations.

Pink highlights sections, whether originally marginal notes or longer inserts, that concern property. The use of the narrative to record and justify landholding or other rights testifies to one particular function of historical remembrance at Pegau (although these inserts were probably made by different individuals at different times).  These are difficult to classify as either core components or glosses, insofar as most seem to have been inserted into the expository text but not to comment upon it--and seemed therefore to deserve their own category.

Orange marks text copied from texts authored independently of, and surviving separately from, the Deeds.

Purple is used to indicate “seams”, that is, places where we discern a compiler’s hand, amending the text with the specific purpose of facilitating the combination of core texts or the integration of interpolations.

Note that these distinctions are sometimes arbitrary or equivocal.

In addition, Brown designates a section, that is, a grouping of interelated component texts.