2.1What a labour law was: Putnam and Cohn
Putnam's study, published in 1908, is a study of enforcement. Its sources are the records of the justices who heard cases under the ordinance of 1349 and under the Statute of Labourers that followed it in 1351. From them she showed that in the first decade after the Black Death they were enforced vigorously and widely, and labourers were prosecuted in large numbers for taking more than the customary wage or refusing to serve. She also showed that the work of enforcing the labour laws grew into the work of the justices of the peace (Putnam 1908).
Cohn's essay is comparative and concerned with attitudes. It compares the labour laws passed after the Black Death across western Europe, which capped wages, restricted the movement of workers and compelled service. Cohn argued that these laws varied from place to place and often contradicted one another, and that they expressed the fear and contempt of elites for labourers as much as any economic calculation (Cohn 2007). His argument is about what the laws reveal. A law that says why labourers are to be compelled, and how they are to be described, is evidence of what its makers thought of the people it bound.
Set side by side, the two accounts answer different questions about the same kind of document. Putnam asks whether the law worked as an instrument and finds it enforced vigorously and widely, to the extent that justices acted on it. Cohn asks what the law expressed and finds that its content was not simply economic. Neither denies the other's finding. The tension lies in emphasis and in what follows. If the labour laws were working instruments, the place to look for their meaning is in the prosecutions. If they were expressions of fear and contempt, varying from place to place, then the wording of each law is itself the evidence, and enforcement is a further question.
A third position is held by no work cited here but follows from the two. A single text might be both: a working instrument with a precise machinery for detection and penalty, and an expression of contempt in its preamble and its description of those it compels. Whether one text can carry both readings, and what each reading would need beyond the text, is what Section 4 asks of the ordinance.
2.2What a state sees: Scott, Suh and Desrosières
Scott's Seeing Like a State argues that states make society legible by simplifying it: standard names, maps, measures, registers. Its sharper claim is about failure: high-modernist schemes that impose such simplifications and override local, practical knowledge, which Scott calls mētis, have failed, sometimes disastrously (Scott 1998). The two parts can be tested separately: that states simplify to see, and that schemes overriding local knowledge fail.
Suh's Naming the Local moves in another direction. It traces how Korean medicine came to be named and defined as local over the centuries, through texts, through medicinal substances, and through the language of an Eastern medicine. In that history the Dongui Bogam's naming of an eastern medicine, and its use of local resources, are a part (Suh 2017). Where Scott's state overrides the local, Suh's history shows it named, and a book compiled by royal command belongs to that history.
Desrosières's The Politics of Large Numbers offers a bridge. Its subject is statistics and the making of states. Its argument is that statistical objects exist through conventions of equivalence: before anything can be counted, someone must decide which cases are of the same kind, and those classifications are at once technical and political; once established, they hold, and become things that can be acted upon (Desrosières 1998). A classification of labourers by trade, or of diseases and medicines by category, is such a convention, whether or not anything is counted.
Side by side, the three works frame the second question of this article. Scott asks whether the command simplified, and whether its simplification overrode what local people knew. Suh asks whether the command named the local, and to what end. Desrosières asks what the command classified as the same, and what that classification made possible. Neither command read here is a high-modernist scheme. The fit is partial, and the article says where it fails.
2.3What a command can show
A command records intention, not result. Richard Neustadt and Ernest May proposed that decision makers separate what is known about a situation, what is unclear, and what is presumed (Neustadt and May 1986). A command can be read for all three: what its authors stated as known (that many labourers had died; that the books of prescriptions were many and confused), what they treated as unclear or left open, and what they presumed without saying so (that neighbours would testify; that a single book could reach villages without physicians). The reading in Sections 4 and 5 follows that sorting without reducing it to a tally.
Reinhart Koselleck described historical time as shaped by the relation between the space of experience, the past present in memory, and the horizon of expectation, the future anticipated now; in the modern age, he argued, expectation drew away from experience (Koselleck 1985). Both commands take a past as their measure. The ordinance takes the wages of a named year. The Dongui Bogam takes the ancient books, selected. In this article's reading, both bind the expected future to remembered experience, which is one reason neither can say what would make it change.