Just Another Day in Chancery Lane: Disorder and the Law in London's Legal Quarter in the Fifteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scarcely any turbulence, quarrels or disturbance ever occur there, but delinquents are punished with no other punishment than expulsion from communion with their society, which is a penalty they fear more than criminals elsewhere fear imprisonment and fetters. For a man once expelled from one of these societies is never received into the fellowship of any other of those societies. Hence the peace is unbroken and the conversation of all of them is as the friendship of united folk. This was Sir John Fortescue's idealized account to the exiled prince of Wales, Edward of Lancaster, of the peace-loving nature of London's Inns of Court and Chancery in the mid-fifteenth century. Fortescue was not concerned with the reality, which, as he knew all too well, was different. He was concerned with impressing on his young pupil the perfection of the English law and the education of its practitioners, rather than the imperfections that existed in a society that the prince, as he explicitly told him, would never experience. Few who were familiar with the legal quarter that surrounded the Inns would have recognized the Arcadia that Fortescue described. Far from being the peaceful and well-ordered district that the former chief justice invoked, in the period when he wrote the area to the west of London's Temple Bar was a liminal space, populated by—among others—large numbers of young trainee lawyers, in whom the kind of unruly behaviour otherwise also associated with the early universities, not least the western suburb's Paris counterpart, thequartier latinto the south of the river Seine, was endemic. Among the most important factors that made it so was the very existence of the established, and to some extent tribal, all-male societies of the Inns of Court and of Chancery, at close quarters with the royal law courts and their heady mix of disputants and hired legal counsellors in permanent competition with each other.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".