Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation - Oh My!:

The "correct" spelling of most words, "proper" sentence structure, word usage, etc., is really a fairly recent concept.  You may hear of "The King's English" or "The Queen's English", which basically make the current Monarch the only authority.  The Oxford English Dictionary, which is the current "gold standard" for English spelling and pronunciation, was not published until the 1880's.  Even in modern colloquial writing, spelling and grammar are quite "flexible", though considerably much less so in formal writing.  However, before the 19th century, and increasingly the further back in time, even formal writing exhibits a great degree of flexibility regarding spelling, grammar and the like.

Spelling of course varies, sometimes even within the same document.  Some older spellings are influenced by Old and Middle English, but the main issue is that there were no standards.  So you may see "paire" for "pair", "bee" for "be".

Improper or questionable word usage was at least as bad - writers had just as much trouble back then with "bigger then" versus "bigger than", and "there ship" versus "their ship", as they do today.

Sentence structure is almost non-existent before the 18th century.  Most hand-written documents seem to contain endless chains of phrases, either without any punctuation at all, or separated by commas, or sometimes semi-colons, with very few (if any) periods.

Archaic Letters:

In English documents before the early 18th century, the long-s ("ſ") is often used (sometimes very difficult to distinguish from an "f").  Generally the long-s is used for the harder "s" sound, and the short-s for the softer "s" sound, but that is merely a guideline, as in many documents both forms are used interchangeably.

In older English documents (16th century and earlier), the archaic thorn ("þ") can be used for the "th" sound.

In my transcriptions, I will attempt to follow the document's use of archaic letters.

There is no Such Thing as "Ye Olde":

In English documents from the 16th through 18th centuries, the word "ye" (often written "ye") is often used in place of "the".  This practice grew out of the the original spelling using the thorn character, as in "þe", but in time morphed into "ye", given the thorn's similar appearance to "y".  In reality, when "ye" is found in a document (in this context), it should be pronounced as "the".

Other short words that start with "th" can also show up with a"y"; such as "yt" (for that) and "yis" (for this).

To add to the confusion, there is a completely distinct word, "ye" that is an archaic version of "you".  In this context, it is indeed pronounced "ye", as in "hear ye, hear ye".

Abbreviations, Elisions and Flourishes:

Abbreviations were used in the past as much as, or possibly more than today, though in the past, there were not as many hard-and-fast rules about what parts of long words are retained and omitted.  Very often, the elision (i.e. omitted letters) would be represented with a flourish, for example: "comm~rs" (for "commissioners"), although the flourish could be more elaborate than the simple "~" I show here (my transcription will show "~", since I cannot properly show a grand flourish).  Alternatively, the abbreviation can be constructed using superscript letters, as in: "commrs" for the same word above.

Possessives:

The use of an apostrophe to indicate possession does not appear in frequent use until the early to mid 18th century.  Prior to that time, possessives are derived from the old "genitive" versions of nouns.  So for example, something belonging to His Majesty, might appear as "His Majesties".  The apostrophe begins to come about from an elision of the occasional extra letters, and eventually becomes formalized, and eventually takes over as the accepted standard.

Gregorian Calendar Adoption:

See:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_calendar

The original Julian calendar, which counted dates from a hypothetical year 1, assumed that the year was exactly 3651/4 days.  It called for observing an extra day (Feb. 29) every fourth year - whenever the year is divisible by 4.  By the early 1500's, it was recognized that various celestial dates (such as equinoxes and solstices) had shifted by roughly 10 days.  This was found to be as a result of having observed too many leap years, due to the year in fact being slightly less than 3651/4 days.

The proposal to remedy this (given the true length of a year is 365.2422 days) was to change the observance of a leap year to every year that is divisible by 4, except when divisible by 100, unless also divisible by 400.  In other words, a leap year was not to be observed in a century year, unless it was every 4th century.  This was also accompanied by a proposal to remove the currently accumulated extra days at one moment.

Pope Gregory XIII issued the Papal Bull in 1582, requiring this change to be made.  This change was made in most Catholic states in that same year, in which Thursday, 4 October, 1582 was followed by Friday, 15 October, removing 10 days, and thereby restoring the celestial events to their correct dates.

The problem is that this change was not accepted in other countries, especially in Protestant countries.  So immediately after the introduction of the new calendar, there were places in Europe where the day after 4 October was 15 October, while in others it was 5 October.  From that point, every date in Catholic countries was perpetually 10 days in the future by the reckoning in Protestant countries.  Correspondence between countries, made it eventually necessary to state dates clearly with both reckonings (such as 5/15 Oct.).

A number of Protestant countries began to accept the new calendar beginning around 1700.  There had been little incentive to do so in 1600 since that was a leap year in both calendars, but 1700 was not a leap year by the Gregorian calendar, which therefore increased the discrepancy to 11 days.

Great Britain made the change, dropping the 11 days between 2 September and 14 September, 1752.

Sweden made an abortive attempt to remove the 11 days one at a time over a 40 year period starting in 1700, but abandoned this and made the abrupt change, shortly after England, from 17 February to 1 March, 1753.

See the article referenced above for the adoption dates in other countries.

The Civil Year in England and Great Britain:

For many years prior to the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar, England had used "Lady Day" (25 March) as the beginning of the civil new year.  This also presented a dual reckoning problem, even between England and other Protestant countries.  Even when the month and day were the same, during the first part of each year, the year in England was one behind the year in other Protestant countries.  During those times, a dual notation for the year would often be used (such as 3 March 1650/51).

England and Scotland united into Great Britain in 1707.  Even after this time, England and Scotland continued to observe different beginnings for the civil year.  Great Britain officially changed the beginning of its civil year, starting the year 1752 on 1 January (making 1751, staring 26 March and ending 31 December, a very short year), to coincide with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar later that same year.