Finding the Family in the Charters of Medieval Scotland, 1150–1350
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In April 1354 the suitors of a baronial court convened at Balantrodoch heard an astonishing tale of gross misconduct on the part of the master of the (by then defunct) Scottish Templars in his efforts to win control over the lands of Esperton in Midlothian. The story that the assembled jurors retold was an astonishing one, involving a violent assault on the widow of a deceased tenant, a fraudulent claim on her estate and the murder of her son.2 The master’s outrageous actions were a source of fascination to the historian who published an edition of the court record a hundred years ago,3 and prompted another scholar to venture the opinion that there was ‘a genuinely unattractive side to the Templars’ character’,4 but the document is noteworthy on several other counts. Not least of these is the vivid detail with which the plaintiff, who clearly came to court primed with facts salient to his claim to Esperton, presented his case. His precise recollection of events and even conversations that had taken place as far back as 1296 bear witness to oral tradition passed carefully down through several decades, an impressive grasp of the minutiae of land law, and (implicitly, if not explicitly) an appreciation of the value of written documents in the curial setting. More than sixty years after the unfortunate widow Christina first lost her hold on the estate of Esperton, Robert Semple of Halkerston successfully won sasine of the lands. On another occasion, this one dating from the early thirteenth century, the monks of Melrose confronted a claim not unlike that of Robert Semple, this time in respect of the patronage of the church of Ochiltree, which they had received as a gift from Eustacia de Colville. When challenged in respect of his title, Abbot William summoned into his court the lady of Ochiltree herself, who recounted in precise fashion the history of her family’s involvement with the church and its adjacent lands.5 In this case, too, the successful claim to valuable property depended ultimately on the preservation of1 The author wishes to acknowledge with thanks the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in the research undertaken for this article.
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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 | 0.023 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".