<i>IN EXTREMIS:</i>Communal Expressions of Serious Impoverishment in the Dominions of the Kings of England, 1250–1450
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on how communities in later medieval England claiming serious impoverishment articulated their plight to those they thought might be able to help through petitions to the king’s government. Using the 454 petitions, mainly in French, submitted to the king’s government between 1250 and 1450 citing substantial communal impoverishment, three main groups of petitioners are examined: secular communities, religious houses, and wider groupings of the population. While these petitions make up only a fraction of all surviving petitions from the later Middle Ages (2.59% of the 17,514 Special Collections 8 Ancient Petitions), they not only embody the most important communal requests for serious need to the king’s government from all such petitions but also represent a significant proportion of the populace as a whole and account for many of the most important communities under the English king’s control. Indeed by focusing on communities rather than individuals, a clearer sense should emerge of how medieval people understood, if not usually articulated, key aspects of their own common good in extremis — rather than how those with power defined it for them. Also by looking beyond England to those lands under the English monarch’s control from Ireland to southern France, we can see how communities on the very fringes of royal power viewed the English government’s role toward them. Overall this article illuminates how medieval communities claiming to be in or moving toward extreme need saw themselves and/or wanted others to see them, the reality of the situation where known, what petitioners thought was the best way forward, and the royal government’s reaction to such requests.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".