The Madman and the Church Robber: Law and Conflict in Early Modern England, by Jason Peacey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in the 1560s, a lease of the 100-acre estate of Warrens Court in Nibley in Gloucestershire became the subject of legal wrangling that persisted for over a century. Jason Peacey’s virtuoso investigation of this dispute answers the questions: why did successive interest holders invest disproportionate resources contesting their rights to it, and why did their actions fascinate a broader public? The chief protagonists in the dispute, the MP and author of The Lives of the Berkeleys, John Smyth—the ‘church robber’—and the Bristol merchant Benjamin Crokey—‘the madman’—left behind voluminous evidence, in addition to litigation records, allowing Peacey to uncover ideological and religious tensions behind their expressed motivations. Both men’s claims to Warrens Court came via marriage, and it is telling that the archival record left by the women involved, such as Katherine Powell and Grace Drew, is thin. However, Smyth kept detailed correspondence and notes of his tactics and expenditures, while Crokey printed and circulated petitions, broadsheets and tracts pressing his cause and then, as his frustrations mounted, calling for law reform.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".