Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

It doesn't look like "will" to me. The first letter looks like medieval "v" and the third and fourth ascenders are too short compared to the others and there's a crossbar.

Shouldn't you be trying to read it in the language it's written rather than trying to wrestle it into English?

JP, I've been looking around and I see that elsewhere you have already transcribed the three letter word and the first four letters of the next word as:

hov vi[ ]l

The hov might not be a big problem because the transliteration of Vav can be either a w or a v. Is "hov" a real word in any language?

On the second word, I'm apparently not the only person who sees a double l (ll) there, whereupon your "crossbar" could be merely a handwriting run connecting an i to the first l. Perhaps you found yourself unable to distinguish the third letter because an "il" would lead to a double i: viill?

On your display of the medieval w, I saw a couple of instances where it was depicted as iv (without the dot). Are there any instances where is was depicted in reverse, as vi (without the dot)?

I see borderline Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Latin words in the marginalia. Why not English, given that, as I claim, the author was English? What you need to do, JP, is offer a sensible alternative to "how will" and I will probably concede to your point of view.