Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

Liber, a Latin word meaning book as a noun or free as an adjective certainly makes a lot more sense than your liver. If that dot were not there, you'd be OK with leber. But, sorry, that dot is there and you ignore it at your own peril.

There is absolutely no way the letter between l and b in leber/leben/lebe (or following the "b") is an "i". No way. No one wrote "i" as a cee shape. I've looked at THOUSANDS of manuscripts and I've never seen an "i" even vaguely close to the "e" in leber. How many medieval manuscripts have you read? I read them in half a dozen different languages.

   

That "blot" at the top is a different color and is on the edge of the parchment. It could be anything and does not look to be associated with the text in any way. The scribe writes "i" as shown on the right:

   

The last character in "leber/leben" might be "r" or might be "n" or might be a mistake they tried to rub out, but the angle is wrong for "i" and there is a curve attached on the right, so "i" is even unlikely for the last letter. The blot at the edge of the parchment might be ink, might be wax, might be something else, or, if it is ink, might be the descender on a line of text that got trimmed off. The marginalia scribe doesn't put the dots that big or that high above the letters.

Regarding your comment on "pf", know that the Free Dictionary has found 2,465 English words containing "pf", so perhaps it could be helpful to broaden your outlook though I concur it's likely German.

Did it occur to you that some of those are loanwords from German? Did you check to see how many of them are in Middle English? Modern English has three times as many words as Middle English, largely due to loanwords (and educational systems). Plus, I really don't have a translation for the last word on the first line. It's too messy to be sure of anything.