We all know that our ancestors could not spell. Anyone who has looked at a parish register will have found variants of even the, to us, easiest of names to spell. One of our genealogists today was researching a family in Somerset, with the mother named Hepzibah. On one of her childrens' baptisms, in 1751, the clergyman recording the event clearly had trouble with the spelling of Hepzibah's forename, and recorded it as "Hepperabath".
It was unlikely that Hepzibah was able to correct the clergyman when he recorded this in the parish register, if she was illiterate, which was one reason that some many spelling variants appear.