← All conjectures · Institutions, law & bureaucracy
Dead kings seal more freely
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
This conjecture joins forgery to risk management: whose name do you dare to fake? A diploma attributed to a living ruler or his recent line could be checked against a functioning chancery, its personnel, and its registers; a diploma of a long-extinct dynasty could be denied by no one. The claim is that forgers systematically over-selected issuers whose dynastic line had ended by the time of fabrication, so that the interval between purported issue and actual manufacture is governed less by the age a right needed to claim than by the horizon of institutional memory the forger had to outrun. If this holds, the age profile of forged attributions becomes an empirical measurement of how far medieval people believed a chancery's memory reached — institutional memory horizons read off the choices of criminals.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause: among spuria in Regesta Imperii with estimated fabrication dates, at least 70% purport to be issued by rulers whose dynasty was extinct at fabrication time, against under 45% for a null model that assigns issuers randomly while matching the purported ages of the documents. Secondary clause: fabrication in the name of the currently reigning house is rarer than in the name of any extinct house of comparable purported antiquity.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Regesta Imperii, using its identifications of spurious and suspect acta together with scholarly datings of their fabrication.
In the kill-dataset registry:
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 scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
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
Forgers' preference for long-dead famous issuers (Dagobert, Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor) is documented, anticipating the direction, but the extinct-dynasty share versus a purported-age-matched null model on Regesta Imperii spuria is un-run.
Sources cited by the triage
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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