Chris Wickham on ‘The Economic Logic of Medieval Societies’: A Response
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Chris Wickham’s theory regarding the feudal economy is predicated on the continuing existence and numerical majority of peasant producers with direct access to their means of subsistence. While his theory holds good for the period up to c.1200, after that point, the numbers of those without direct access to their full means of subsistence increased so much that their impact on the economy has to be considered in any explanatory model. Furthermore, subsistence needs to be understood not only as what is needed for biological survival, but also what is needed for social survival and reproduction. Because of the extent of market demand and dependence in the period after c.1200, the economic logic of societies in core regions during this period does not accord well with the model Wickham proposes. It is also, however, not to be understood as capitalist, proto-capitalist, or necessarily leading towards capitalism. This period needs to be understood on its own terms as neither feudal nor capitalist.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it