Concordance 203

Concordance 203 is a single-leaf Concordance of the Fourth Recension, admitted to the register in the winter of the year recorded as 4412 and never amended. It is among the shortest documents in the Concordance series and, by most measures used in the amendment ledgers, the most frequently invoked. Its operative text runs to eleven words. Everything else on the leaf — the seal, the marginal apparatus, and four lines of a supersession clause that refer to nothing — is generally held to be binding anyway.

Text and physical description

The leaf is struck on standard scriptorium stock, 31 by 22 centimetres, and bears the Fourth Recension seal in the lower right quadrant, partially overstamped by a second seal of uncertain office. The operative clause reads:

"What has been reconciled once shall not be reconciled again, save by leave."

— Concordance 203, clause 1

Clause 2 is the supersession clause. It states that Concordance 203 supersedes "that which it follows," without naming an antecedent. Three successive readings by the Concordance Reconciliation desk have declined to supply one, on the grounds that supplying it would itself constitute a reconciliation. The fourth line of the clause is illegible beneath the overstamp and has been ruled non-operative twice and operative once.

Relationship to the supersession sequence

The placement of Concordance 203 in the wider series is uncontested only in the negative. It is not the Third Concordance, which explicitly superseded the Second Concordance and says so at length. Nor is it the Fifth, which superseded the Fourth and was in turn appended by Concordance 399 under Concordance Update Y54315445. Concordance 203 belongs to the Fourth Recension and therefore predates the Fifth by at least one full supersession, though the register gives no interval. The Tracking office records the matter as "settled, and settled repeatedly," which is the office's standard formula for a question it has stopped answering.

A minority position, advanced by the clerks of the eastern scriptorium and never formally withdrawn, holds that Concordance 203 was drafted as an annex to the First and mis-filed during the recension of 4413. The evidence is a stain. The majority rejects it.

The leave question

Clause 1 permits a second reconciliation "by leave," and does not say by whose. Four offices have claimed the power to grant leave: the Reconciliation desk, the Keeper of the Quill, the Office of Seals, and — by a reading of clause 2 that no one has been able to reproduce — the Zero chamber. In practice leave is granted by whoever is at the desk when the request is made, and the request is then filed under the granter's name rather than the applicant's, a convention introduced in 4429 after an applicant died between filing and decision and could not be notified.

The most-cited ruling on the question is the Ash Winter memorandum of 4467, issued from the seventeenth landing during a closure of the upper stairs. Faced with a request to reconcile the same pair of clauses for the ninth time, the duty clerk wrote that the Tower "has reconciled this matter to the limit of its patience, and the limit of its patience is a form of leave." The memorandum was entered into the register without amendment and has been cited in every leave dispute since.

Interaction with other Concordances

Concordance 7 cites Concordance 203 twice in its marginalia and once in its body, in each case for the proposition that a reconciliation, once made, is closed. Concordance 33 cross-references Concordance 7 extensively and by extension reaches 203, though the chain is not stated and the Reconciliation desk treats it as established by usage rather than by text. Concordance 23 is sometimes said to have been superseded by Concordance 203; this is a confusion with Concordance 22, which superseded Concordance 23 in its entirety and shares with 203 only a seal-hand and a filing cabinet.

The Metrological Accord adopts clause 1 by reference for the closing of weights, and the Fifteenth Concordance quotes it in a footnote without attribution, an omission that has been raised four times and corrected none.

Disputes and the narrow reading

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the word "again." The broad reading holds that any matter once reconciled anywhere in the Tower is closed to all subsequent reconciliation, which would render most of the register inert; the narrow reading holds that only the specific reconciliation is closed, leaving the matter open. The narrow reading prevails in practice. The broad reading prevails in citation. No document reconciles the two, and under clause 1 none may be issued without leave.

A secondary dispute concerns whether the overstamped seal invalidates the leaf. The Office of Seals maintains that an overstamp is a correction; the eastern scriptorium maintains it is an accident. Both positions are recorded, both are sealed, and neither has been reconciled. Under Concordance 203, neither can be.

Copies of the leaf are held at four locations on the ninth and seventeenth landings. One is a forgery of 4471, executed so faithfully that it reproduces the illegible fourth line, which the original does not.