worke instead of worke

English didn’t really have standardized spelling until the 19th century iirc.

The author is evidently quoting something very old (Jamestown was settled in the early 1600s) and that spelling is typical for that time. Modern spellings were not widely standardized until the era of mass literacy.

Because they are using the spelling John Smith would have used.

You have your answer, but I wanted to clarify that Nobel prizes aren't awarded for single books. They're awarded to an author for making significant contributions to literature after a lifetime of writing.

Its an very old way to spell work. It's not something that is used today. Its similar to how the world old was once spelled olde. You average person would think its a typo.

obsolete, old-timey spelling of "work".

This is sometimes called "Colonial English".

Older English didn’t really have spelling rules

It's old. There are some *rough* trends, like how you *tend* to see an extra -e on single-syllable adjectives either when modifying a plural noun *or* after "the". But mostly, you just learn to not be surprised when there's an extra -e at the end of a word in Early Modern English

You have your answer, but I wanted to clarify that Nobel prizes aren't awarded for single books. They're awarded to an author for making significant contributions to literature after a lifetime of writing.

English spelling really wasn't codified until comparatively recently.   So in older documents you will see very different spellings for words. 

That's how they wrote in those days. The general rule was "write down what you hear" which resulted in inconsistent spellings, *even from the same author.* For example, William Clark (1770-1838), a co-leader of the Louis and Clark expedition, travelled from Illinois to the Pacific and back, bravely misspelling everything along the way. His journals contain 27 known spelling variations for the word "Sioux". In 1806, Noah Webster--half of the namesake of the current dictionary company Merriam-Webster, published his first dictionary which included a list of spelling reforms, which was a major catalyst for standardizing modern American spelling. (See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language\_spelling\_reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform) for more--it's an extremely complicated topic.) #

A long time ago, spelling in English was not standardised so people really just wrote words however they wanted to

No rule. This is a quote from \~400 years ago, and many words were spelled or used a little differently then.

John Smith, a Protestant, was paraphrasing 2 Thessalonians 3:10. In the Geneva Bible of 1587, this was translated (before English spelling was standardized) as, “that if there were any, which would not worke, that he should not eate.” This is more commonly quoted today as, “If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.”

It follows the rule of being old. The older the document, the less likely it is to follow modern spelling rules. In this case, they are directly quoting what Smith wrote, and he wrote it that way with that spelling.

>The word "work" was used here multiple times in the form "worke". What rule does this follows? None. The quote pre-dates the implementation of consistent spelling rules in the English language. It's not uncommon to see the same word spelled differently in the same text. The e at the end of "worke" comes from the fact that verbs in older English used to have a suffix to denote their infinitive clause, in the case of work it would originally have been "werken", possibly abbreviated to "werke", then with the french influences on the language, the final e became a silent letter, and because it was silent and didn't contribute to the sound of the word, it eventually just got dropped.

It's very old (relative to now) English; many words were spelled differently, particularly the addition of "e" and the doubling of consonants. Often people will jokingly indicate that they are referring to "the olden days" by writing something like "Ye Olde Shoppe" to mean "The Store," because this pattern is well-known. The important thing for you to know is that this is no longer a rule of any kind, and these spellings have nothing to do with written English today. But they were the way everyone wrote English at one time (in this case, the early 17th century).

It's a quote from early modern English. 1607 or so. As such, it doesn't really follow any modern rules of English.

Because it’s a quote from the early 1600s. It appears to be quoting a source from Jamestown, which was founded 1607. Lots of English has changed since then