A royal command records what a ruler wanted done, by whom, under what penalty or reward, and often why. It does not record what was done. Written before anyone knew how it would turn out, it keeps the knowledge, categories and fears of its hour in a form later events have not rewritten.
This article reads two such commands. The first is the Ordinance of Labourers, issued in the name of Edward III of England in June 1349, after what its own text calls "that pestilence". Its text survives in Latin and is read here in the English translation that Ernest F. Henderson printed in 1892, in the copy addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury. The second is the account of a command, not the command itself: the preface that Yi Jeong-gu wrote, by royal order, for the Dongui Bogam, the medical compendium that the physician Heo Jun presented to the Joseon court in 1610, together with the editorial principles that open the work. The preface quotes two royal instructions, the first given by King Seonjo when he set the work in motion and the second by his successor when he received it. The principles set out how the book was arranged, how its doses were standardised, and how it named its medicines.
The question is the same for both. How did the English crown in 1349 command the labour of those who had survived the pestilence, and how did the Joseon court, between its first order and the book it received in 1610, command a physician's knowledge? The question is about the form of the command: whom it addressed, what it required, what standard it set, how it expected to know whether it was obeyed, and what reason it gave. It is not about whether either command achieved its purpose. Neither text can answer that, and the platform records set beside them do not try.
The question matters for two debates. The first concerns the English labour laws after the Black Death. Bertha Haven Putnam, from the records of the justices who enforced them, showed that the laws were enforced vigorously and widely in their first decade and that enforcement grew into the work of the justices of the peace (Putnam 1908). Samuel Cohn, comparing labour laws across western Europe, argued that they varied, often contradicted one another, and expressed elites' fear and contempt of labourers as much as any economic calculation (Cohn 2007). The two differ in what they take a labour law to be: an instrument measured by prosecutions, or an expression of its makers' attitudes.
The second debate concerns what a state sees when it commands. James C. Scott argued that states make society legible by simplifying it, and that high-modernist schemes which override local, practical knowledge have failed (Scott 1998). Soyoung Suh's history of how Korean medicine was named as local, in which the Dongui Bogam's naming of an eastern medicine has a place, shows the local being named rather than overridden, with the Dongui Bogam as part of that history (Suh 2017), and Alain Desrosières's account of classification as at once technical and political offers a bridge between the two (Desrosières 1998).
The contribution of this article is to test both debates on the wording of the two commands. The ordinance shows, in one document, both the enforcement machinery that Putnam's justices worked and the contempt Cohn finds in such laws. On legibility, the two commands simplify in different directions. The ordinance fixes a standard, the wages of a named year, but takes its content from local custom and hands the seeing to neighbours, aggrieved parties and informers. The Dongui Bogam's royal instruction simplifies books, not practices: one selected work, one classification, one dose unit, and, in the same breath, the local names of local medicines written down. Neither overrides local knowledge in the way Scott's high-modernist schemes do.
The placement of the secondary works in these two debates, and their application to the two texts, are this article's own. Each work is cited only for what it argues.
Section 2 sets out the two debates side by side. Section 3 describes the texts, the platform records and the parent study's ledger. Section 4 reads the ordinance; Section 5 the preface and principles of the Dongui Bogam. Section 6 brings them together, and Section 7 concludes.