This article asked how the English crown in 1349 commanded the labour of survivors and how the Joseon court commanded a physician's knowledge, and read the Ordinance of Labourers in Henderson's translation and the preface and editorial principles of the Dongui Bogam in classical Chinese, with the modern summaries Skeptron wrote for its platform beside them.
The ordinance bound a defined class, the able bodied under sixty with no land or craft, to serve at wages fixed to the custom of a named year in each place; it enforced the rule through local agents, custody and money penalties, cut down earlier contracts, priced food by a looser standard, foresaw the failure of its own officers, and forbade alms to the able-bodied poor, whom it described as idle and given to crime.
The Dongui Bogam's command ordered one book selected from many, classified for use, with a single dose unit and every local medicine written with its local name, place, season and method of drying, so that people without physicians could know them. Interrupted by war and a king's death, it was completed by one physician partly in exile and ordered printed and spread before the preface recording it was written.
For the debate between Putnam and Cohn, the ordinance contains both the instrument and the expression; the text cannot weigh them. For Scott's argument, both commands simplify, and neither overrides local knowledge: the ordinance depends on it, and the Dongui Bogam writes it down. For Suh's history, the editorial principles show the naming of an eastern medicine as an explicit choice.
The limits are those of the sources. Henderson's translation stops before the end of the ordinance, so the instruction to the archbishop is missing. The Dongui Bogam text is a transcription of an unnamed edition, and every English rendering of it here is this article's own. Neither text records outcomes, and the platform records add dates and holdings, not effects. The ledger reads the records and so cannot see what the texts say about who bore the cost.
Three lines of further research follow. The first is to read the ordinance beside the records of the justices who enforced it, as Putnam did, and ask whether the machinery the text describes, the two witnesses, the private prosecutor, the justices to be assigned, appears in those records as the text designed it. The second is to read the Dongui Bogam's printing and distribution records, if they exist, beside the preface's order to spread the book within and beyond the capital. The third is to ask whether other commands issued after a loss, whether of people or of knowledge, name those who bore the loss, and whether the platform's records of them keep that naming or lose it.
Appendix: the ledger's values for the two cases
The values below are the parent study's, as its two codings gave them, for the platform records of the two cases. They are readings of the records, not of the ordinance or the preface. "Unsettled" means the two codings differed.
| Case | act | act kind | act before proof | gap named | count | bearer named | revision in case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Ordinance of Labourers | yes | restriction-of-movement-work-or-assembly | not-said | not-named | no-count | not-named | not-named |
| The Dongui Bogam | yes | institution-compilation-or-gift | unsettled | named | settled | not-named | named |
Agreement between the two codings across all 89 cases, for these cells: act 75 of 89 (84%); act kind 74 of 89 (83%); act before proof 69 of 89 (78%); gap named 76 of 89 (85%); count 78 of 89 (88%); bearer named 70 of 89 (79%); revision in case 67 of 89 (75%).
Among the 23 cases the parent study reads closely: act kind was restriction-of-movement-work-or-assembly for 5 and institution-compilation-or-gift for 3; bearer named was not-named for 13, named for 5, unsettled for 5; count was no-count for 10 and settled for 2.
The parent study's fifth hypothesis (E5: in most cases that show a public act, the case's own text does not name who bore the harm or the cost while the act waited) was read as unclear on the strict reading (supports 17, against 6, unclear 49, not applicable 17; share 74%) and as supported on the lenient reading (supports 21, against 9, unclear 20, not applicable 39; share 70%). Both records here count among those that do not name a bearer; both source texts, read in Sections 4 and 5, name one.
The value "named" for revision in case in The Dongui Bogam rests on a sentence the record lists among its recurring frame sentences; Section 5.10 explains why this article does not treat it as a finding.