The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[eggyk]

i've come across almost everything you can imagine: juillet, jullet, julet, juingnet, juinget, jungnet, jugnet, jules, jullé, julh, iuylol, even an extremely rare joingnet or joignet. Not a single jollet has ever been found, other than a lone "joilet" that I had to request from the BNF library. 

Aberil is much the same. There are loads of abril, abrel, aberel, abrillen, abrellen floating around, but actual usage of "aberil" is almost non-existant and highly unlikely to come across. 2 of the 3 aberils we have (aberillen) are actually direct copies of an extremely old poem (and are nestled within 700 pages of text). The only other places we've seen aberil are in farmer records, where the people writing were far less educated and more likely to phonetically write their dialect. 

One could make the exact same argument about the lobster whose:

• legs are on its tail (of which only a few very rare cases exist),
  
• has four tail flaps (of which no examples have ever been found, only 3 or 5 flaps exist),
  
• scissors on its head (of which still no examples exist).
  

It's not unlikely that a forger would simply:

• make mistakes by accident, say, because of a copy error, or
  
• make deliberate mistakes in an effort to obfuscate the manuscript even more.
  

The fact that you have found no examples of aberil or jollet, points to one of these hypotheses. It could simply be that aberil and jollet never existed historically, they were simply copied wrong, deliberately or otherwise, as the vast majority of the imagery in the VMS.

So actually, the fact that we found no aberil and jollet, actually points me to a likelier forgery hypothesis.

1) We have 28 examples of exactly 4 flaps, its not even uncommon. What makes you think its only 3 or 5?
2) We have ~40 examples of 2+ pairs of legs on the ribbed area of cancer, and another ~50 examples of 1 leg or 1 pair
3) If you mean the 3 spikes on its head, it's so common im not even going to bother counting. 
4) We have found 3 aberils in manuscripts directly, and many secondary attestations in obscure farmer records from the alps

I sincerely recommend looking at the spreadsheet. 

Jollet is the only one not found (although joilet and joingnet have been found, where ngn makes something like a 'nyuh' sound- close to french L). Whoever wrote those month names knew that they were writing in french and german. To have me believe that the forger was competent enough to write in a believable handwriting, draw in believable styles, yet doesn't know "juillet" is french for July (and has been for 600 years) is definitely interesting. 

Making deliberate mistakes seems crazy if you're desperately trying to make the document look real, no?