Bibliographic record
Abstract
Duties of the royal minstrels The royal household minstrels fulfilled a wide spectrum of requirements, ranging from the most official ceremonial duties to the most nearly private entertainment for the king or other personage. Since almost the whole of a monarch's life was ‘official’, minstrelsy of various sorts must have been needed every day: and while there would be plenty of warning of any occasion needing large resources (such as a major feast or the arrival of a foreign ruler), some solo or small concerted minstrelsy might be demanded at any time. The four minstrels required at all times would have been enough for normal day-to-day requirements, with the rest of the minstrels coming to Court for the major feasts of the year. In theory this arrangement cut the costs of minstrelsy to a minimum; in practice, the year was full of minor celebrations and occasions for which more than the minimum minstrelsy was needed. The only substantial extant account of the minstrels’ duties is in the Liber Niger of 1471–2. While this is late in our period, the ‘Black Book’ was based on earlier ordinances, and the basic outlines of a royal minstrel's work cannot have changed greatly for a long time. The minstrels played to announce meals. Outside the feasttimes when all the minstrels were present, this function was presumably carried out by the two trumpeters on permanent duty. Their other main function was to signal the king's position in the countryside when he went riding, so that the household could follow. If the king wished it, the two trumpeters could be supplemented by two string-minstrels, bringing the resident minstrels to the four (two loud and two ‘still’) specified in previous ordinances. The still minstrels would be able to provide intimate entertainment: and if other still minstrels were present in Court there would be a wider range of possible minstrelsy. The other nine minstrels specified by the Black Book were to come to Court at v festes of the yere, and than to make theyre wages of houshold after iiijd. ob. a day if they be present in court; and than they to auoyde the next day after the festes be don.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.419 | 0.114 |
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".