General Court Martial of Patrick Mcdonald 26–27 April 1775, the National Archives, UK, WO 71/80 FF. 412–22.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While soldiers were notorious womanisers, the army did not always turn a blind eye toward rapes. This case was considered serious enough to merit a General Court Martial, which involved two days of testimony heard by thirteen officers, whose verdict was subject to royal review. During the Quebec campaign sixteen years before this trial, General James Wolfe had vowed to use the death penalty against any of his men caught mistreating women. Attitudes to rape were complex, however, both within and outside the army. Rape was a capital offence in the civilian courts, but remarkably few men were convicted. This trial is similar to its civilian counterparts in having defence testimony that was primarily aimed at questioning the chastity of the alleged victim in order to imply that she had consented to sex with the accused. The guilty verdict and 600-lash sentence shows that the army found rape victim Mary Griffin’s story more credible, but it is important to note that the penalty was not exceptionally severe. It was common for both regimental and general courts martial to award sentences of several hundred lashes for a wide variety of offences from theft to insolence. These penalties would be carried out in separate intervals, all under a surgeon’s eye, in order to ensure that the convict suffered no permanent damage that would affect his ability to do his duty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.483 | 0.247 |
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".