The Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Provenance Stamped in gold to a small rectangle of marbled paper and pasted inside the upper board of the guild book is the coat of arms of the eighth earl of Bridgewater, Francis Henry Egerton. The title was inherited by Egerton in 1823 and with it came the wealth that enabled him to make a bequest of over £12,000, in addition to his collection of manuscripts, to the British Museum. A supplementary £3,000 was bequeathed to the British Museum in 1838 by Charles Long, Baron Farnborough and cousin of Egerton. Monies from the Farnborough fund were used to purchase the York guild book in 1881. A brief minute reported the purchase on 9 April for the sum of £30 from W. H. Richardson. Custodianship by the British Museum, now British Library, is but one stage in the use and provenance of the manuscript. The volume was sold, presumably on two occasions, following its ownership by the Guild and before it entered the collections of the British Museum. A note written in gold ink on fol. 34 v states that the ‘book came into the possession of Mr. E. N. Alexander, by purchase, AD 1817’. This refers to Edward Nelson Alexander, a solicitor from Halifax with genealogical connections to medical men of York. Upon his death in 1859, the Halifax Guardian reported that ‘in a literary view, he will be much missed, he being one of the deepest read antiquarians of the parish’. In 1830 Alexander had been a founding member of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society and he was subsequently elected as the Society's curator for antiquities and coins. Alexander was also a collector; he donated to the Society 150 coins from his personal collection and exhibited to his colleagues three antique gems in his possession. Antiquarian interests and financial means make Edward Nelson Alexander just the sort of person who would have acquired the guild book in 1817. It might even have been familial connections to medical practice in York that made the manuscript an attractive purchase; fol. 108 v notes that a Doctor Alexander was made a contributor of the Guild. Regardless, the volume was not purchased as a source of useful medical knowledge but as a means of exploring the past.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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 teacher head, 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".