Interpretation amendments to Novgorod birchbark letter no. 307

In this article, a new interpretation is proposed for several cruces of the birchbark letter
no. 307. The most important of the proposed amendments to the reading is that of the
five letters of the penultimate line depicted on the drawing as crossed out, four are actually
located in a crack in the bark and therefore should be included in the edited text of
the manuscript. The only character that the author really crossed out gives a clue for a
relatively confident reconstruction of the intended meaning of the last sentence. The
phrase contains an unusually big lot of graphic mistakes and, in addition, is the result of
an unsuccessful syntactic correction. Furthermore, a detailed phonetic commentary is
given to the toponym Gorotъney, which contains an error in the designation of a voiced
consonant. The article also develops the hypothesis about a possible prosopographic
connection of Parfey mentioned in the manuscript with Nefedya Parfeyev, who appears
in Vasily Fedorovich's bargain (parchment letter no. 130). As a result, the last phrase of
the manuscript and, consequently, the manuscript itself receives a more reliable interpretation
than it has had so far. Izboischa peasants complain to their masters about Parfey
and Netrebuy, accusing them of falsifying last wills and court summonses, while Parfey
and Netrebuy claim that they only stamped these documents, having no reason to doubt
their authenticity.