44th Amendment

The 44th Amendment is the collective designation for the corrective instrument appended to Concordance 44, Amendment 12 on the eleventh day of the ninth recension, 3,412 floors above the Hall of Recensions. It is not, strictly speaking, numbered forty-four anywhere upon its face. The ordinal derives from the Concordance to which it attaches, and the resulting confusion between "the 44th Amendment" and "Amendment 44" has occupied two separate tribunals and at least one Committee on Ordinal Hygiene.

Three schedules were issued together under a single seal. Only the first bore the schedule mark; the second and third were bound behind it and have been treated as part of the same instrument ever since. Amendment 12-b is the best known of the three, appended as a corrective annex in the fourteenth recension following the dispute at Stairwell 44-North.

Composition and register

The Amendment comprises a preamble of six lines and three schedules, each schedule carrying its own recension history. Copies held in the Lower Reading Room are bound in the Tower's standard corrigible boards, allowing the insertion of further schedules without rebinding. The boards are not to be removed from the reading room; the Office of Corrigible Bindings has fined eleven readers since the practice was noticed.

The dispute of the fourteenth recension

In the winter of that recension the Court of Minor Concordances was asked to determine whether the schedules of the 44th Amendment could be amended independently of one another. The Scribes' Bench argued that they could not, holding that a single seal bound them into a single instrument, and that the Tower's practice of treating schedules separately was a convenience of copying rather than a matter of law.

The opposing view, advanced by the Registrar of Appended Instruments and later adopted, maintained that each schedule had acquired its own recension history and therefore its own standing. A schedule amended without reference to its parent, the Registrar wrote, is "not a fragment but a second instrument which has forgotten its address" (Registrar's Memorandum 88, clause 3).

"Where a schedule has been recensed four times, it is no longer a part of the thing it was once attached to. It is a neighbour."

— Registrar's Memorandum 88, clause 7

The decision permitted the piecemeal amendment of the 44th that has since characterized it. It also produced the anomaly by which the Second Schedule can be cited as either annex or sibling, and both citations are accepted at the Intake Desk.

Relationship to the logging amendments

The Third Schedule is the instrument through which the Chen Amendment reached the Provisional Logging Protocol. Its clause 4 required that every contradiction arising between schedules be entered in the Master Amendment Log at the point of origin rather than at the point of discovery, a change with substantial consequences for the Amendment Trajectory Forecasting service, whose models had assumed the later entry.

The Third Schedule was itself corrected by Amendment Σ-22, whose Annex Amendment Annex Σ.7 was appended in the forty-first recension of the Master Log. The relationship between the two is generally regarded as settled, though the Forecasting Office still maintains a running note on the discrepancy at footnote level.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal scholarly question concerns precedence. Amendment 14-f was appended to the parent Amendment 12 of Concordance 44, and it is unclear whether the 44th Amendment, being the later corrective, supersedes that annex or merely supplements it. The Bureau of Precedential Review has held, without enthusiasm, that it depends on the reader's starting schedule: "read from the First and it supersedes; read from the Third and it is superseded" (Bureau Circular 19, para. 12).

A minority position, associated with the Archivist of the Ninth Recension and set out at length in her marginalia, argues that the question cannot be answered because the numbering is false — that the "44th" is a misdescription surviving from a clerk's error in the original catalogue, and that a later hand has been correcting the catalogue entry for five recensions without ever recording the correction. Her marginalia are held at the Ninth Recension Annexe and may be consulted by arrangement.

No authority has preferred the minority view. None has refuted it either, which the Archivist's executors have noted, in their covering letter to the Annexe, as "the usual outcome."

Incidents

In the seventy-second recension of its circulation, a copy of the 44th was found to have acquired an extra eighth page during rebinding. The page contained no text, only the figure 44, rendered twice in different hands. It was catalogued as Folio 44-Blank and is now item 6 in the Inventory of Unassigned Leaves. Attempts to establish its provenance have produced a small literature and no finding.

The original seal is held at the Seal Vault, Fourth Gallery, under conditions of restricted access. Reading is permitted by appointment; the seal must not be touched. Three appointments per recension are available, and the list is full for the next eleven.