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

parity/cases/chunkmd/prose.md

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+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.