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The layman loses the letter
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
We estimate medieval government output from surviving acta, but survival was decided by the recipients, not the chancery — and this conjecture joins the diplomatists' category of deperdita (documents known only because something else mentions them) to the sociology of who could keep paper. The claim is that the deperditum share is a recipient-archive gauge: imperial acta issued to lay recipients vanished at a multiple of the rate of acta issued to churches, because a monastery is an immortal filing cabinet while a knightly family is two fires and one failed male line from oblivion. The gap should then narrow sharply and datably in the thirteenth century, exactly when towns institutionalize civic archives. If this holds, part of the apparent medieval "growth of government" is really the growth of recipients capable of preservation, and issuance estimates need a recipient-side survival correction that this ratio supplies.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause: in Regesta Imperii, the share of deperdita among acta addressed to lay recipients exceeds the share among acta to ecclesiastical recipients by a factor of at least 2 for the tenth through twelfth centuries. Secondary clause: for thirteenth-century acta to towns with attested civic archives, that ratio falls by at least one third relative to the earlier lay baseline.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Regesta Imperii, exploiting its systematic registration of deperdita alongside surviving acta and its recipient identifications.
In the kill-dataset registry:
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use and no information ingress of any kind; the packet was emitted as a single JSON text message for the orchestrator to persist.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The ecclesiastical-over-lay survival advantage is a diplomatics commonplace (e.g. only 11 of 161 surviving charters of Malcolm IV went to laymen), but using Regesta Imperii's deperdita registrations to compute a lay/ecclesiastical loss ratio and its thirteenth-century civic-archive narrowing is un-run.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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