ARTIFACTS IN THE TEXT.

[nablator]

I think some of the fancy gallows (the ones that are stacked vertically) might be a way of writing gallows + gallows.

Since they are only found on the first line of paragraphs, they are not useful in the rest of the text. My speculation is that they allude to how the cipher works.

The word cistus (a kind of wild rose) is usually written cisty (cist + [us]), but occasionally it was written gm (cis+tis) and this less common variation was perfectly readable.

Anything too easily identifiable, such as Latin abbreviations, is probably part of the deception, not part of the solution, so I am looking for alternative interpretations.