Arrin of the Seventh Landing

Arrin of the Seventh Landing (fl. 1362–1401; re-designated 1401 by provision of Concordance 44, confirmed under Seventh Concordance, Clause 412) was the first Stairwarden of the Tower and the originator of the office's standing doctrine of measured passage. His appointment is recorded on a single slate in the Seventh Spire and has never been contested, although almost everything else about him has.

The Seventh Landing itself no longer exists in a form any survey party can confirm. It is listed in the Register of Landings, Provisional under the note "present whereabouts subject to seasonal revision," a formula the Bureau of Vertical Topography has declined to clarify since 1477.

The first appointment

Concordance 44 established the office of Stairwarden and named Arrin to it in the same clause, a drafting practice later forbidden by Concordance 61 after the Affair of the Two Doorkeepers. The appointment was made without interview, examination, or recorded consent. The slate carries four words of justification: "He was already ascending."

As Stairwarden, Arrin fixed the practice of counting treads rather than floors, on the reasoning that floors are administrative and treads are not. The count he established on the Seventh Spire run — 1,144 treads between landings, of which 61 are "attendant" and not counted — remains the standard against which all subsequent runs are certified. Spire 44 was surveyed to his figures in 1388 and found to differ by two treads, a discrepancy the surveyors attributed to settling and the Stairwarden's office attributed to the surveyors.

The procedural latency question

Arrin's later career is inseparable from the Doctrine of Procedural Latency, the principle that an action completed in the correct form remains in force after the actor has ceased to be able to perform it. The doctrine was articulated around the case of a Junior Indexer, also named Arrin, whose filing was found still to bind the Tower four days after his death, on the ground that he had "not yet finished not finishing."

Clause 412 of the Seventh Concordance formalized the loophole and, in the same instrument, granted a posthumous designation and pensionary rights to Arrin of the Empty Pockets, a figure whose relationship to the first Stairwarden has been debated for a century and a half. The Commission on Posthumous Designation held in 1604 that the three Arrins are distinct persons who "have been conflated chiefly by clerks in a hurry." Supervisor Arrin and Librarian Arrin, both of whom served in the office of the Stairwarden and left extensive memoranda denying any relation, declined to appear before the Commission.

"Nothing in the present clause shall be read to revive a designation once lapsed, except where the lapse was itself procedural, in which case it has not occurred."

— Seventh Concordance, Clause 412, second recension

The first recension of Clause 412 does not contain this sentence. The Scriptorium of the Ninth Register maintains that it was struck in 1402 and the Chapter of Revisions that it was added in 1611. Neither office has produced the intermediary copy it must have passed through.

The Arrin question in the schools

Scholarly disagreement centres not on the facts but on the epithet. Lira of the Forty-Seventh Landing, writing in On Literal Compliance, objected that the name "of the Seventh Landing" attaches a person permanently to a floor whose position is unconfirmed, and that this is precisely the sort of potential axiality she spent her career rejecting. The School of Procedural Purists she led argued that a designation should describe a function, not a place, and proposed "Arrin of the Office" by amendment.

The amendment was tabled three times and read on none of those occasions. The Axis of Compliance entry for 1893 records the dispute at length in Lira's own words, alongside a note from the Registrar of Styles observing that the Tower had "managed twenty-nine years without the change and could likely manage a further twenty-nine."

A minority position, advanced by the School of Absolute Constancy, holds that Arrin was never Stairwarden at all but a title adopted in rotation by the office's first seven holders, and that the slate in the Seventh Spire records the last of them. The School's evidence is a water stain.

Death and re-designation

Arrin's death is recorded in the Roll of Ceased Offices as occurring in 1401 "between landings," without further specification. His posthumous designation under Clause 412 took effect in the same year and was executed twice — once by the Commission and once, apparently in error, by the Clerks' Bench of Landing 209.1, a duplication traceable to the confusion with Arrin the Indexer.

The error was not corrected for six years and generated a pension paid quarterly to two offices, both of which reported the surplus and neither of which returned it. The Audit of Small Excesses recovered the sum in 1408 and noted in its findings that the matter had been "regular throughout."

Legacy

The Stairwarden's successors have kept Arrin's tread-count, his refusal to certify a run he had not personally descended, and his reported remark to the Concordance Assembly that a stair is "a document one climbs." The remark is carved above the door of the Landing of the First Warden in the Seventh Spire, though the Assembly's own minutes for that decade contain no such sentence and the attribution rests on a memorandum of Basalt of the Seventy Seventh Spiral, who was nine years old at the time.

Visitors to the Landing of the First Warden are asked not to count the treads aloud.