Learn English – What did Old English use Ꝥ for

The Tironian et and the modern ampersand had different origins, with the Tironian et having been invented as one of ~13,000 symbols/shorthand by Cicero's scribe, Tiro. It persisted until it succumbed to a linguistic witch hunt during the middle ages, when suspicion was cast upon it for appearing to be a rune or secret cipher. (This detail has been rightly contested, as the Tyronian et does appear in printed books.)

The "et -> &" (ampersand) had no such shady character associations and continues to today. In fact, it allowed for some ornamental experimentation on the part of scribes and typemakers.

The Tironian et died everywhere except for in Ireland, where it still lives in the wild.

(Also in Unicode: "⁊", though some OSes or browsers may not display it.)

It is not used as a period, but as and, which is often how sentences were related them to a previous sentence in early narrative. You can see the periods (or "points")ending your sentences before the and. There was, however, a dearth of punctuation in many manuscripts. Notable exceptions were apostrophes, "C" for chapter, and "¶" used to mark paragraph divisions.

Modern punctuation, designed to clarify syntactic structures rather than to indicate breathings, is largely a Renaissance invention, developing during the first generations of the printing press, and codified in the eighteenth century (about the same time that capitalization and spelling became fixed in more or less their current form). Among the earliest works showing "modern" punctuation is Francis Bacon's Essays. An interesting early discussion of the nature of modern punctuation can be found in Ben Jonson's English Grammar (composed ca. 1617, printed posthumously in 1640). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century punctuation practice varies considerably, but tends to be "heavy"; current "light" punctuation is largely the invention of H. G. and F. G. Fowler, The King's English. - Manuscript Studies, Medieval and Early Modern IV.vii. Paleography: Punctuation

In your example, there are end points (though not at baseline).

In the notes of the Wikipedia article about minims, there's a link to the work of Heidi Harley, an author who supports the idea you transcribed, that is, that some spellings came from the scribes writing words differently to avoid confusion in minim clusters. Among other interesting things, the work says, in pages 292-93, that

The letters u, i, v, w, m, and n were all written using a sequence of a particular short downstroke of the quill, called a minim (the word minim itself would have been written using only minims). When several letters made of minims came in sequence, they were exceptionally hard to decipher. Was it an i and an m, or two ns?
Consequently, in some frequent words spelled with sequences of these letters, a convention arose whereby one of the offending vowels was changed to an o, so that the vowel-consonant sequence was clear. In general, this caused little pronunciation difficulty, because the words were common enough that everybody could just recognize them. Some words whose spellings were affected this way were woman (originally wimman), come (originally cume) and love (originally luve).

You can also find a picture exemplifying the minims in that page.