Trade, Trust, and Testamentary Practice in Late-Medieval London: Commerce and Continuity in the Romeyn–Burford Family, 1280–1330
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis provides the most detailed study to date of a merchant family active in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century London. In two parts, it charts the commercial life cycle of a family of prominent London pepperers over a fifty-year period, from 1280 and 1330. Part one analyzes the family’s economic activities, trade relationships, and its means of ensuring the generational continuity of commerce and the transmission of land and capital. It concludes with a case study of the continuation of merchant commerce by a widow, Roesia Burford. Part two probes the extensive testamentary evidence connected to the family, illuminating the trust-based relationships between testators and executors and reconstructing the executors' activities in detail. The resulting portrait of the family’s activity over multiple generations contributes to the historiography of London’s mercantile milieux and provides novel insight into the relationship between commerce, family strategy, and testamentary practice.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".