The original is the exception

Claim (verbatim)

The Anglo-Saxon charter corpus advertises itself as nearly nineteen hundred texts, but almost none of them are the objects their dating clauses describe. The Electronic Sawyer records, item by item, whether a charter survives as a contemporary single sheet or only as a later copy, and the single sheets judged contemporary or near-contemporary with their purported dates are commonly put at around two hundred - with perhaps another hundred single sheets that are themselves later or imitative copies. Everything else lives through cartularies (the Codex Wintoniensis, Hemming of Worcester's book, the Textus Roffensis), later registers, and post-medieval transcripts. The mechanism of the asymmetry is custodial physics: a bound book is a library object that antiquaries collected when the monasteries fell, while a loose engrossed parchment was muniment-room furniture, scattered or discarded at the Dissolution unless a cathedral chapter with unbroken custody (Canterbury, Worcester, Exeter) happened to keep the chest. The oldest survivor - Hlothhere of Kent for Reculver, 679 (S 8) - is a freak of exactly that custody. The consequence is a floor under the loss estimate that requires no speculation at all: every text transmitted only in copy once existed as at least one engrossed sheet, so the catalogue itself certifies well over a thousand lost originals before a single wholly-lost charter is counted.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: classifying every Electronic Sawyer item by its earliest surviving witness, the share surviving as contemporary or near-contemporary single sheets will fall below 0.20 of the catalogue and above 0.04 (primary clause: the sub-0.20 contemporary-single-sheet share; the verdict follows it), and at least 1,300 items will have a later copy - cartulary, register, or antiquarian transcript - as their earliest witness, each implying at least one lost engrossed original. Disambiguation pinned: 'contemporary or near-contemporary' means the catalogue or its cited editions judge the single sheet's script datable within roughly a generation of the purported date; later single-sheet copies and imitative productions count as copies. Coverage guard: the test voids if more than 15 percent of items lack usable manuscript information.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Electronic Sawyer (esawyer.org.uk) manuscript fields for all ~1,900 items - classify each item's earliest witness as contemporary single sheet, later single sheet, cartulary/register copy, or modern transcript, and count.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The share is the field's own headline arithmetic: Sawyer's handlist catalogues c. 1,875 items with per-item manuscript records, and the standard apparatus (Keynes's facsimile-corpus introduction and single-sheet lists, the Electronic Sawyer's introduction) puts single-sheet survival at roughly 300 sheets of which about 200 are judged contemporary or near-contemporary - a contemporary-single-sheet share of c. 0.10, squarely inside the pinned 0.04-0.20 window, with the >=1,300 later-copy complement guaranteed by the same subtraction; the claim text itself quotes the printed figures. Only the item-by-item earliest-witness bookkeeping is left, and it cannot move the primary clause.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.