The question put to two episodes of trouble with prices was whom their texts blame, whether the measure follows from the blame, and whether Skeptron's modern records keep it. The preamble of 301, in Kent's translation, blames a few rich sellers, rules out the harvest, and says nothing of the coinage. Its measure follows from its blame clause by clause, a ceiling because the fault is excess and death because only fear restrains, and it extends the blame to the buyer and the holder whose conduct would defeat the ceiling. Those who suffered are the soldiers and the poor, those who are to pay are the blamed, and no end is named. Mackay's narrative of 1841 spreads the same vice across the company's directors, both Houses and a nation of every rank; the Act at its centre is a bargain over debt that follows from no blame, and the blame is laid against it by its opponents. Skeptron's record of 301 keeps the blame and drops its victims and penalties; its record of 1720 replaces blame with a mechanism.
The addition of this study is a separation of three things: the party blamed, the party that suffered, and the party made to pay for the measure. The texts hold them apart and later accounts merge them. In 301 the authority arranged the three so that the blamed and the paying were the same people. For the reading of the edict as a pronouncement issued with a monetary reform, the case shows a public argument that works by excluding the cause the scholarship adds. For the debate between mania and fundamentals, it shows that blame belongs to the period narrative and mechanism to the modern accounts, and that Mackay's own chapter holds both.
The limits are plain. The two sides are unequal: an authority's own text for 301, a later popular narrative for 1720, and no Act, proclamation or company document of 1720 among the texts read. The preamble is read in Kent's English of 1920, from an uncorrected machine reading, without the Latin, and the list of prices and the rest of the edict are not read at all. Mackay's excerpt stops before the collapse, so nothing here is said about who lost, or what Parliament did afterwards. The records are modern platform summaries, and the ledger asks who bore a cost, not who was blamed. Nothing here says what caused prices to rise in either episode, or whether either measure worked.
Further work follows from these limits. The Latin of the preamble would show whether Kent's English carries its accusations faithfully. The Acts of 1720, and Parliament's response to the collapse that Dale's history covers, would show what the British authorities themselves said about the fault. And the same three questions, who is blamed, who suffered, who pays, could be put to the other emergency acts in Skeptron's records, where a ledger question on blame would let the comparison be counted rather than only read.
Appendix: Ledger Figures Used
From the parent study's ledger of eighty-four Skeptron cases, two codings of one model.
The two cases, as the study's close reading of twenty-four cases gives them:
| Case | act | act kind | temporary | exit named | outcome of term | dates apart | figure | bearer named |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diocletian's Edict on Prices | yes | sanction-or-price-control | not-said | not-named | not-said | not-named | no-figure | unsettled |
| The South Sea Company | yes | unsettled | not-said | not-named | not-said | not-named | no-figure | not-named |
Across all eighty-four cases, the cell bearer named stands at not-applicable 38; not-named 34; unsettled 8; named (implied) 2; not-named (implied) 1; named (stated) 1. Among the twenty-four close-read cases it stands at not-named 17; unsettled 5; not-applicable 1; named 1. The act kind sanction-or-price-control (stated) is settled for 2 cases.
F5 (who bore the cost is not named): supports on the strict reading (supports 31, against 1, unclear 29, not applicable 23; share 97%) and on the lenient reading (supports 35, against 3, unclear 6, not applicable 40; share 92%). F1 (no condition, date or event for the act's end is named): supports on the strict reading (share 88%) and the lenient reading (share 83%).
Cases whose record lets a later reader judge an emergency act by its own end (an act presented as temporary; an observable condition of its end named; who bore its cost named; two dated moments named): 1 of 42 (2%); neither record read here is that case.