Abstract

Two royal commands, issued centuries apart and at opposite ends of Eurasia, answered a loss of people with a text. In June 1349, after the great mortality, Edward III ordered that able-bodied men and women under sixty without land or a craft must serve whoever sought them, at the wages paid before the pestilence, and that those who refused, left early, paid more or took more be punished. In Joseon Korea, King Seonjo ordered the royal physician Heo Jun to gather the scattered books of prescriptions into one, to select what mattered, and to write down the local names of local medicines so that people without physicians could know them; the work, the Dongui Bogam, was presented in 1610 and printed in 1613. This article asks how the English crown commanded the labour of survivors, and how the Joseon court commanded a physician's knowledge, by reading Henderson's translation of the ordinance and the classical Chinese preface and editorial principles of the Dongui Bogam, and setting beside them the modern summaries that Skeptron, a history studio of the RISCON family, wrote for its platform. It joins two debates. The first, between Putnam's account of vigorous enforcement and Cohn's account of labour laws as varied, contradictory and expressive of elites' fear and contempt, asks what a labour law was. The second, around Scott's argument that states make society legible by simplifying it and override local knowledge, asks what the state sees when it commands. The ordinance borrows its standard from local memory and hands the seeing to neighbours; the Dongui Bogam simplifies books while writing the local down. Neither text records an outcome, and neither settles either debate.