chunkmd: page and chapter aware chunking, roles, footnote flag

This commit is contained in:
funkpower
2026-09-19 11:22:56 -04:00
parent acf8605d37
commit e0473fb8ae
45 changed files with 2054 additions and 11 deletions
+24
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
## Select Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society. Translated by L. A. Manyon. London: Routledge, 1961.
Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946.
———. An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
Duby, Georges. The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980.
Ganshof, F. L. Feudalism. Translated by Philip Grierson. New York: Harper,
1961.
Hilton, R. H. Bond Men Made Free. London: Temple Smith, 1973.
Maitland, F. W. Domesday Book and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1897.
Postan, M. M. The Medieval Economy and Society. London: Weidenfeld, 1972.
Vinogradoff, Paul. Villainage in England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892.
+12
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
# Contents
Preface......vii
One. The Setting......1
Two. The Quarrel......22
Three. The Break......45
Four. The Settlement......70
Five. After the Settlement......99
Appendix A. The Renders......121
Appendix B. The Mills......134
Bibliography......150
Index......161
+29
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
## Chapter One
There are no page markers in this text, because the format it was converted
from had none. A chunker that needs pages will produce nothing useful here,
and one that falls back to character position will find the chapter correctly.
The chapter itself concerns the difference between a right and a habit. A
right can be pleaded; a habit can only be described. The men in these records
pleaded habits as though they were rights, and the courts, with a patience
that is easy to underestimate, let them.
## Chapter Two
The second chapter takes the same question into a period where the records are
better. Better records make the problem worse rather than easier, because they
show how much of what looked like custom was in fact a settlement of a dispute
that had gone the other way a generation earlier.
Custom, in this reading, is the name given to the outcome of a quarrel nobody
alive remembers having. It is stable exactly as long as the memory of the
quarrel is dead and the conditions that produced the settlement persist. When
either changes, custom turns out to have been a treaty all along.
## Chapter Three
What remains is to say what this means for the wider argument, which is less
than it might appear. The valley was not typical. It was chosen because its
documents survive, and documents survive where somebody had a reason to keep
them, which is itself a fact about the place.
+22
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
# Index
abbey, 44, 47, 91
advowson, 12
agriculture, 12, 34, 102
assize, 7, 19-22
bishops, 7
boon-work, 88
charters, 88, 91
commons, 14, 15, 16
demesne, 14-16
escheat, 120
estates, 3, 44
fealty, 201
frankpledge, 55, 56
heriot, 61
homage, 3, 4, 201
manor, 1-8, 14, 33
merchet, 62
mill, 71-79, 84
villein, 90, 91, 104
wardship, 118
+11
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
## Notes
12. Arendt, *The Human Condition* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 44.
13. Bloch, *Feudal Society*, vol. 2, p. 17. See also Duby, op. cit., 203.
14. The point is made at length in Maitland, *Domesday Book and Beyond* (Cambridge, 1897), 220-24, and again, with qualifications, in Vinogradoff, *Villainage in England* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 88.
15. Ibid., 91.
16. https://example.org/records/valley, consulted 12 March.
+11
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
## Notes
12. Arendt, *The Human Condition* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 44.
13. Bloch, *Feudal Society*, vol. 2, p. 17. See also Duby, op. cit., 203.
14. The point is made at length in Maitland, *Domesday Book and Beyond* (Cambridge, 1897), 220-24, and again, with qualifications, in Vinogradoff, *Villainage in England* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 88.
15. Ibid., 91.
16. https://example.org/records/valley, consulted 12 March.
+3
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
<!-- Page 40 -->
One sentence follows another without a paragraph break for the whole of this page, which is the case the sentence splitter exists for. The mill stood at the northern end of the valley, where the fall of the river was steepest and the ice came latest. Its wheel was undershot, which was wasteful, and nobody replaced it for two hundred years because the cost of replacing it fell on one household and the benefit was spread across four hundred. The abbey's mill, two miles downstream, was overshot and newer and better, and the abbey charged more to use it, which the valley resented and paid. When the lord's wheel finally failed, in a winter the chronicle calls hard without saying how hard, the valley ground at the abbey for eleven months and discovered that it preferred the abbey's flour. The lord rebuilt anyway. He had to: the right to compel grinding was worth more than the flour, because it was the visible sign that he could compel anything at all. A right that is never exercised is a right that is being tested, and he knew it, and so did they. The rebuilt mill ran for another century and was still running, badly, when the survey of 1439 recorded it as ruinous and in use. That phrase, ruinous and in use, is as good a description of the whole arrangement as anything a historian has managed since.
+43
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
This preface was set before the pagination began, and any tool that starts
reading at the first page marker will lose it. That has happened, and it cost
a book all but two thousand of its characters.
<!-- Page 1 -->
# I. The Setting
The valley is twelve miles long and never more than two wide. At its northern
end the river enters through a gorge that no road followed until the last
century; at its southern end it leaves through a marsh that no road follows
yet. Everything that happened here happened to people who could not easily
leave, and who knew it.
The population in the first surviving survey is given as four hundred and six
households, which at the usual multiplier means somewhere near two thousand
people. That figure held, within a tenth either way, for three hundred years.
<!-- Page 2 -->
What changed was not how many people lived in the valley but what they owed
for the privilege. The earliest schedule lists eleven separate renders, seven
of them in kind. The latest lists two, both in coin. Between those two
documents lies the whole of the argument.
It would be convenient to say that the change was gradual. It was not. Two
thirds of it happens in a single generation, in the middle of the fourteenth
century, for reasons the documents do not give and which have to be supplied
from outside.
<!-- Page 3 -->
# II. The Quarrel
The quarrel began over a mill. It nearly always does. A mill is the one piece
of capital in a village that everybody must use and only one person can own,
and the law of the mill is therefore the law of the place in miniature.
The lord's mill stood at the northern end, where the fall was steepest. The
abbey's mill stood two miles downstream, on land the abbey had been given by a
man whose grandson disputed the gift. Both houses claimed the right to compel
the valley's tenants to grind at their own stones, and both were prepared to
break the other's.
+32
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
The argument of this chapter is that the obligation ran both ways, and that
contemporaries said so plainly whenever they were asked. A lord who could not
protect was a lord who could not command, and the men who owed him service
said as much in language that has survived in the court rolls.
What the rolls do not say, and what has to be inferred, is how often the
obligation was actually tested. A tenant who withheld service in a year of
famine was not making a constitutional argument; he was hungry. The clerk who
recorded the withholding had no vocabulary for the difference, and so the
record flattens the two into one offence with one penalty.
This flattening is the central difficulty of the sources. It is not that they
lie. It is that the categories they were written in were designed to produce a
number at the bottom of a column, and a number at the bottom of a column
cannot distinguish a rebellion from a bad harvest. Everything that follows
depends on reading around that limitation rather than through it.
Three approaches have been tried. The first counts the offences and treats the
count as a proxy for discontent, which assumes the clerk's attention was
constant across years when we know it was not. The second reads the language
of the entries for signs of unusual trouble, which works where a clerk was
talkative and fails entirely where he was not. The third, adopted here,
compares the same manor across decades and treats changes in what was recorded
as evidence about the recorder as much as about the recorded.
None of the three is satisfactory, and the third has the particular weakness
that it needs a long run of documents from a single place. There are not many
such runs. The ones that exist are concentrated in the south and east, which
is to say in exactly the regions where the argument is least likely to be
surprising. A reader who wants to know what happened in the north will find
this chapter unsatisfying, and the reason is that the documents do not exist,
not that the question is uninteresting.
+17
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
<!-- Page 5 -->
# Ἀθῆναι and Μόσχα
Le café était naïve, and the first ligature in that sentence is a single
codepoint rather than two letters, which is the sort of thing that moves a
token boundary without moving a character boundary.
東京から来た手紙には、日付が二つ書いてあった。One was the date it was written
and the other was the date it was meant to be read, and the difference between
them is the whole subject of this section.
مرحبا — the paragraph above is followed by a right-to-left greeting, then by a
combining acute on a bare e: é. None of this is unusual in a converted
book, and all of it has broken a chunker at some point.
Straße, Ægypt, first, ॐ. The list is arbitrary. Its purpose is to be awkward.