Murder and Mutilation in Early-Stuart England: A Case Study in Crime Reporting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although historians have long recognized that crime pamphlet authors were not very faithful reporters, it has been difficult for them to establish precisely how much fiction this literature contained because of the limited availability of other sources with which to compare them. Using a case study approach, this essay examines two murder pamphlets, both written in 1606, that describe the murder of a young boy, Anthony James, the mutilation of his sister, Elizabeth, and the conviction and execution of their alleged assailants, Agnes and George Dell. The presence of two pamphlets describing the same series of crimes was unusual, and, through a process of detailed comparison and critical interpretation, provides us with an opportunity to reflect further on the accuracy and purpose of crime reporting in early modern England. The two versions contain a great deal of contradictory information, were seemingly written for very different audiences, served a variety of functions for contemporary readers, and raise the question of whether the authors believed that justice was done in this case.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".