Early English Spelling

My completely scientific and researched for almost two minutes theory about spelling in English is that it falls into three main periods:

1. Early Period: If you knew how to write, you wrote however you wanted to, using whatever letters you felt like, maybe mixing them up on Tuesdays, or grafting in a few cool words from Old French or Norse or something to avoid copyright infringement. Nobody cared; they were much more interested in the naked ladies you painted in the margins. This went on for centuries until the...
2. Middle Period: In 1913, Arthur Wynne invented the crossword puzzle, which led to Scrabble and spelling bees and suddenly you had kids getting stressed out about weekly quizzes in school. "Mama, I spelled dendranthropology wrong and have to stay late and clean the blackboard." There were rules to follow: I before E except after C, and except in weird words like weird. It was hard to live with. Our civilization assigned software engineers to the problem and they created...
3. Late Period (present): Idiot AI spelling robots that infest smartphones and push you around, insisting that you really wanted to write Why can't twitter do something about all the ducking nazis. The software engineers were pleased with their work, and used their stock options to buy Teslas.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Okay, enough ranting, let's look at a few examples from the Early Period.

Examples

War: Early English (EE) was a violent language. People got in a lot of fights back then. There are many words for war that you can find in a handful of EE dictionaries, including: feide, guerr, guerre, hwar, hware, hwer, hwere, hwier, uerrien, waer, war, weir, weorren, were, werre, werreian, werrian, whaer, whar, and worre. I ended up using war for a conflict because it read better, but have a character named Werre and one of the words for soldiers used in the books is werriour.

Omen: Not as many choices here. I found boding, foredene, hwate, osse, skelton, token, and tokne in EE dictionaries. None of them quite worked for what I needed, but bodement is an acceptable modern word that did the trick.

School: I found academe, academie, colage, gramerscole, scole, scoleie, and scuola. Of these, academe and scuola worked fine in the books. I wonder if the lack of variation is due to the scarcity of education back in the olden days.

Orchard: There's considerable tree-related content in my books, especially the first one. I've cast a broad net here for words meaning "a collection of trees" in some form or another, and there are plenty to choose from. Some should look familiar, or almost so. Spelling remains bendy-flexy for: aldercarr, alderker, apple-terre, arberye, arbour, archet, aurtigards, barrow, bearu, berie, car, erbere, garth, garthe, geard, graf, gravys, grefes, greue, grof, grofe, grove, groven, gruoba, holt, orcanei, orceard, orcerd, orchærd, ort-geard, schawe, shaw, verger, vergere, vergier, and wudeleie. Whew. I found good uses for arberye, gearn, and aurtigards in the books.

I'm not sure what the point of all this is, except maybe the next time your phone stresses you out because you can't spell restrant restarant restaurnt oh hell cafe correctly, keep in mind that any would've been fine back in the good 'ol days before crossword puzzles and software engineers. And remember, always be ready with your left in case the nazi ducks.

* Subtitle, rough translation: The world is your oyster.