Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gower the Conservative For modern readers, John Gower is likely to appear as a thinker who was ‘conservative’ in his outlook, being rigidly elitist in his views and relentlessly condemnatory to those whom he saw as challenging the existing social hierarchy. Barrie Dobson, for instance, awarded him ‘the title of Jeremiah of late fourteenth-century England’ and bemoaned his ‘monotonous, heavy-handed and extremely pessimistic approach to his theme’. If Gower's reputation is justified then it owes a good deal to his treatment of peasants in general and to his response to their participation in the Great Revolt of 1381 in particular, where he portrays the rebels as vicious animals who are without reason or merit. Gower was writing during a period of tumultuous change in English society and economy, following successive devastating outbreaks of plague after 1348. Here we set out the reality of the changes which English society underwent during this period and examine the intellectual framework that Gower employed to make sense of them. The abundance of central government and local sources which has survived from this period has allowed historians in recent years to recover a great deal about the lives of the lowest ranks of society, to reassess the changes after the Black Death and to re-interpret the causes of the Great Revolt. It will be argued here that fundamental changes to the labour market shook the ideological and moral framework of society, and that the attempts of the ruling elite to make sense of what was happening – and their inability to prevent it – informed the development of a poetic common voice in Ricardian England. The historical evidence indicates that Gower was not only a conservative thinker but was backwards looking even by the standards of his own day. The Peasants and the Third Estate Of the estimated 2.8m people in England in the 1370s, the overwhelming majority – perhaps 85% or more – belonged to what contemporary social commentators defined as the third estate, the laboratores whose ordained role was to provide food, clothing and shelter through manual labour for the other two estates: the oratores, who prayed for society and sought to bring it salvation, and the bellatores , whose task was to provide physical protection and justice.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".