1. Men þa leofestan, halie, soðlice: these words are added above the line in the same hand, but do not correspond to anything in the Latin source. Perhaps they were added to improve the introduction, making it sound more like the beginning of a sermon.

2. BN lat. 12,270 (printed in Appendix I) states that the city was Armenia. BN lat. 12,270 and Letter A shorten the travels of the Sunday Letter considerably; compare the list at the beginning of Letter B.

3. Whereas the Latin suggests that those present asked to understand the reasons for the letter's appearance, the Old English suggests that the letter itself states these reasons. In addition, the Old English translator does not connect its arrival on a Sunday with its message of Sunday observance as the Latin does.

4. On sunnandæg … ofer eow: the list of restrictions generally follows BN lat. 12,270 but omits trade (mercatum non facientes, Appendix I, line 12) which, in any case, seems superfluous with the following mention of buying and selling. The Old English also contains an item not in the Latin: the baking of bread. This prohibition is not a regular feature of Recension I, occurring only in the fifteenthcentury copy in Graz 248. It is, however, common in Recension II, as in Munich 9550 panem coxerit (Delehaye, ‘Note’, p. 179); cf. C99 bread bace, D60 hlafas bace, E165 hlaf baceð, F198 hlafes bakeþ). The Penitential of Theodore also forbids the baking of bread (see Chapter 2, p. 29). For ofer eow (BN lat. 12,270 super nos) see the Tarragona manuscript: super vos (Priebsch, Letter from Heaven, p. 35).

5. Cf. Exodus XX.11.

6. No other copies of Recension I have this comment. If the translator's Latin source had the sinful and righteous spending 5220 years in hell as does BN lat. 12,270, he is probably responsible for changing it to 5228. Ultimately, the 5228 figure goes back to discussions of the ages of the world found in various patristic and later medieval sources, including several Old English texts; Eusebius, for instance, assigns this number to the period from creation to Christ's preaching of the Sermon on the Mount; see H. Tristram, Sex aetates mundi: Die Weltzeitalter bei den Angelsachsen und den Iren: Untersuchungen u. Texte (Heidelberg, 1985), p. 22.