Marriage and Morals in the Fourteenth Century: The Evidence of Bishop Hamo's Register
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at the register of Hamo de Hethe, bishop of Rochester 1317-52, as it documents the attempt by the Church to exert its control over marriage and sexual morality. In Bishop Hamo's Register are the records of many cases of adultery, fornication, maintenance, and so on, which suggest that many of the individuals called before the bishop or his officials had their own ideas of what constituted acceptable behaviours, and that these ideas were at odds with those of the Church. The Church had its own definition of marriage, which was not necessarily shared by laypeople; many men and women summoned to the bishop's court for repeated fornication were clearly in long-term relationships. Often the commitment of the partners to each other had been undertaken in a form recognized by both parties, but in private and without priestly blessing. The Church put pressure on people to solemnize unions in public (in facie ecclesie), using a range of punishments including public whippings to discipline such people, whom it considered incorrigible fornicators. The paper argues that the ecclesiastical values which the Church sought to impose were more complex than we might at first assume, since the clerics who formulated them were influenced by lay values and customs as well as by ecclesiastical ones. This interaction was neither equal nor harmonious, and it took the Church centuries to achieve a measure of control – never complete – in these areas. Hamo's Register demonstrates the process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".