The layman loses the letter

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

We estimate medieval government output from surviving acta, but survival was decided by the recipients, not the chancery — and this conjecture joins the diplomatists' category of deperdita (documents known only because something else mentions them) to the sociology of who could keep paper. The claim is that the deperditum share is a recipient-archive gauge: imperial acta issued to lay recipients vanished at a multiple of the rate of acta issued to churches, because a monastery is an immortal filing cabinet while a knightly family is two fires and one failed male line from oblivion. The gap should then narrow sharply and datably in the thirteenth century, exactly when towns institutionalize civic archives. If this holds, part of the apparent medieval "growth of government" is really the growth of recipients capable of preservation, and issuance estimates need a recipient-side survival correction that this ratio supplies.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: in Regesta Imperii, the share of deperdita among acta addressed to lay recipients exceeds the share among acta to ecclesiastical recipients by a factor of at least 2 for the tenth through twelfth centuries. Secondary clause: for thirteenth-century acta to towns with attested civic archives, that ratio falls by at least one third relative to the earlier lay baseline.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Regesta Imperii, exploiting its systematic registration of deperdita alongside surviving acta and its recipient identifications.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use and no information ingress of any kind; the packet was emitted as a single JSON text message for the orchestrator to persist.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The ecclesiastical-over-lay survival advantage is a diplomatics commonplace (e.g. only 11 of 161 surviving charters of Malcolm IV went to laymen), but using Regesta Imperii's deperdita registrations to compute a lay/ecclesiastical loss ratio and its thirteenth-century civic-archive narrowing is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

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