The country justice and the case of the Blackamoor's Head : the practice of the law in Lincolnshire, 1787-1838
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The legal system eighteenth-century England has generally been viewed as an instrument of class justice, imposed by magistrates drawn from the gentry and aristocracy, and weighing harshly on the labouring and servant classes. The rare survival of the justicing notebooks of Thomas Dixon of as a working farmer an unusual recruit to the magistrates' bench, make it possible to draw a more nuanced picture. The only Lincolnshire magistrate to leave records of his work out of sessions, his books detail those cases he heard and resolved alone, often in my house at Riby, between his appointment 1787 and his death 1798; they provide an illuminating glimpse of the justice system operation at its lowest level, where stealers of ducks and absconding servants were brought before a country justice - and reveal procedures frequently not found other published accounts. The detail furnished by these volumes is amplified with extracts from other records, including those of quarter sessions and parish constables. Edited by B. J. Davey. The second part of the volume presents papers from an arbitration of 1838 between the licensee of a remote beer house (The Blackamoor's Head) and the son of the local squire, with the former pressing the latter for repayment of a debt. The near-verbatim evidence describes the behaviour of the bankers - the local term for navvies - engaged deepening the adjoining river. The inn also provided hospitality to drovers who stopped overnight with their beasts en route from Scotland, and their bills provide rare quantitative evidence of the final years of this trade. Edited by R. C Wheeler. B.J. Davey taught History at the Immingham School and the University of Lincoln; R. C. Wheeler has written widely on cartographic and local history.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".