Minstrelsy in noble and ecclesiastical households
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The domestic context Any householder is the head of a household, whatever its size. A small household may have little or no structure, but it will have financial or bartering transactions, and the building must be maintained. If a household employs servants there are wages to be paid, and at a certain size of the household some records are needed. Records may be secretarial or financial, and they depend on someone in the household (or someone brought in from outside) being literate and numerate. The households that concern us here are all of a considerable size. The king's household usually comprised around four hundred people, and some noble households approached the king's in size. In 4 Ed III the king gave liveries to a total of 669 persons, who would include members of dependent households and some servants who were not permanent members of any household. Many noble households supported minstrels – this livery-list named nineteen, as well as a waferer and three vigiles – and these roughly divide into three categories. First, the minstrels regularly employed by the head of the household, taking wages and annual fees, and normally being granted a livery in exchange for their allegiance to the principal; and some local minstrels employed, perhaps regularly, on an ad hoc basis. Second, the minstrels of important visitors, treated as honoured members of the visiting household: they normally performed during their visit, and would be rewarded accordingly. Third, some independent minstrels, or liveried minstrels not travelling with their patron or employer, would seek hospitality. These might be sent away without performing, perhaps receiving a small sum in compensation; or they might be allowed to perform, in which case they would be rewarded with money and a meal. All three categories of minstrel appear in the household accounts, although one cannot always identify the category to which a particular minstrel belonged. We have so far discussed only royal households, but both the secular and the ecclesiastical nobility maintained households that included minstrels. Some bishops and abbots kept at least one still minstrel as a personal household servant, and many gave rewards to visiting minstrels.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.002 |
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".