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The scribe's plague dividend
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)
The Black Death is famous for doubling wages; books are famous for being labour-intensive; the obvious inference is that books got much dearer after 1348. The conjecture joins the labour shock to a simultaneous materials shock and says the obvious inference is wrong: fewer people and roughly unchanged herds meant skins per surviving customer rose, parchment cheapened, and the two forces roughly cancelled, leaving book prices nearly flat while the scribe's own take per folio soared. The scribe captured the dividend that the buyer never saw in the price. If this holds, the post-plague generation shows a unique divergence — scribal fees and book prices, normally locked together, pulling apart by half — and the standard everything-got-expensive narrative breaks for the book trade specifically.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (carries the verdict): comparing 1350-1400 with 1300-1348, recorded scribal fees per folio rise by at least 40% in silver terms while sale prices of comparable plain books change by less than plus-or-minus 25% in silver terms. Secondary clause: attested parchment prices fall or stay flat across the same divide.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
SfarData fee-bearing colophons bracketing 1348 and SDBM price records for comparable books before and after; the kill is a statistical before-after comparison of the two series.
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 from the model's own knowledge in a zero-tool session and emitted directly as final text.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Bell et al. study English book prices straddling 1348 and post-plague wage jumps are well quantified, but the specific two-shock cancellation hypothesis—scribal fee per folio +40% in silver while plain-book prices stay flat and parchment cheapens—has not been isolated as a before/after divergence.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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