Minstrels and Minstrelsy in the Elite Households
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction to Part I These first five chapters consider minstrelsy in households, of which the king's was the most extensive as well as the best-documented. The principal sources of information about the king's household are the financial accounts of the Wardrobe and the Chamber. Not all of the records have survived, but even so there is an astonishing amount of material providing information on the day-to-day activities of household members, including the minstrels. These accounts contain the financial records of some special occasions, and the information these give is very important: but the accounts are also valuable in recording, in considerable quantity and detail, the kind of information that other sources do not – the wages, liveries, gifts, and reimbursements of expenses – and all in the context of often extensive and almost continuous travel as the court moved through the countryside. The information provided is basically objective: and although it is sometimes fragmentary, not easily interpreted, or inaccurate due to the errors of the accounting scribes, it is at least free of the deliberate hyperbole, allusion to symbolisms and other spin-related considerations that often make iconographic and literary sources problematic. The records of dependent royal households – those of the queen, Prince of Wales and the king's younger sons – are equally detailed. Their survival is less extensive, however, and other secular households, even those of the great nobles, also yield much less documentation. Their recording systems were often robust, but unless the records were archived securely they could be lost or destroyed. Although there are some extensive survivals for short periods of time, most financial evidence consists at best only of a journal – the daily record of transactions – of an individual year or so. There are other types of record that can be useful, such as registers and household ordinances, and these help to build up a picture of life in a major household. The domestic records of religious houses are likewise variable. At their best, they are the result of a meticulous accounting and archiving system, but in many cases water damage, accidental loss and deliberate destruction (especially at the dissolution of religious houses in the mid-sixteenth century) have ensured that little evidence remains of them. Unsurprisingly, the highest survival-rates are found in the archives of two cathedral priories that were refounded as secular cathedrals with minimum disruption of their lives: Durham and Worcester (although the latter's records are mainly of a later date than we consider here). For most houses, especially those that were dissolved in the 1530s, it is only by very good luck that any records have survived.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 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".