Scribes and elaborate gallows

[Skoove]

The special ligature gallow on f8v, I think, is actually very telling. The scribe's desire to use benched gallows to make a stylised ligature might have let slip the underlying meaning of benched gallows. Which is, a benched gallow is equivalent to a gallow + bench (in that order). We expect a paragraph/page should start with a gallow, yet we see instead, this page starting with 'cth'. The only way therefore to render this as a paragraph initial gallow is for 'cth' to be equivalent to 'tch'. 

I know others have speculated that a benched gallow is a gallow + bench based on the frequency of gallow + ch compared to ch + gallow, but this might be a different line of evidence that draws the same conclusion.