Concordance 207

Concordance 207 is a single-leaf instrument of the Concordance series, last recension dated to the winter of Year 4091, and held in the East Aperture reading room at catalogued pressure. It is chiefly remarkable for having been cited, in the whole of its recorded life, only once in argument and never once in a matter of substance — a condition its own second paragraph anticipates and forbids.

The leaf is twenty-two lines long, ruled at a spacing of nine millimetres, and sealed in green wax with the mark of the Office of Minor Instruments. Its opening clause is a formality. Its second is not.

"No clause of this instrument shall be depended upon save in circumstances the instrument itself has raised."

— Concordance 207, cl. 2

Contents

Concordance 207 runs to four clauses and a schedule. Clauses 1 and 2 are procedural. Clause 3 assigns to the instrument a sphere of application described only as "the matters enumerated at Schedule alpha," and Schedule alpha is blank, having been left so at recension by the scribe Elder Vessin of the Ninth Landing, who noted in the margin that she had "not been furnished them." Clause 4 provides that the instrument may be amended by any Librarian of the fifth grade or above, provided the amendment is made on the leaf itself.

There is no space left on the leaf. The final amendment, entered in Year 4103 concerning the folding of the schedule, occupies the bottom margin and runs upward into the seal. The Quill of Concordance is recorded as having been requested for the purpose and refused.

Legislative history

The instrument was drafted under the authority of The Fifth Concordance, which had superseded the Fourth some eleven years earlier, and it was presumed at the time of drafting to fall within the reconciliation effected by Concordance Update Y54315445. That presumption was never tested. When the compilers of Concordance 892 came to index the minor instruments of the period, they found Concordance 207 listed in the register of the Third Concordance, Annex VII but absent from every schedule of the Fifth, and appended a note reading only: "position unresolved; see 207."

The note was not subsequently seen by anyone. The index of 892 is arranged by first clause, and the note falls under clause 1, which is a formality, and formality entries are consulted only by clerks who already know what they are looking for.

The Vessin objection

The single recorded citation of Concordance 207 occurs in the dispute of Year 4107 over the height of the second landing of the North Stair, a matter which had already been settled twice by measurement and once by exhaustion. The clerk Halloran Meek produced the instrument before the Assizes of the Middle Floors and argued that as Schedule alpha was blank, the instrument could have no application, and therefore the Assizes had no competence, and therefore the stair's height remained as it had been found in the winter of 4091 — that is, unrecorded.

The Assizes did not accept the argument. They did, however, accept the instrument into the record, and it has remained there since, cited in no other proceeding. Meek's petition for the correction of the register was returned to him with a note in the hand of the Registrar: "The instrument is cited. That is the citation you request." He did not appeal. He is recorded as having taken up the post of Keeper of the Blank Schedules in the following year, which post he held until his death and which had not previously existed.

Dispute over clause 2

There is no settled reading of clause 2. The narrow construction, advanced by Concordance Reconciliation and adopted in practice by most offices, holds that the clause bars the use of the instrument as authority in any dispute not created by the instrument, which is to say in any dispute at all, the instrument having created none. The broad construction, maintained in the annotated recension of Concordance 23 and by the Lost Concordance Faction before its reclassification was nullified under Update Y54315445, holds that the instrument raises circumstances merely by being cited, and that clause 2 consequently makes every use of it valid — a reading that would render the clause self-fulfilling and the instrument unbounded.

The Fifteenth Concordance is silent on the question, though its Annex 3 lists Concordance 207 among instruments "of acknowledged force and unacknowledged effect," which is either a compromise or an evasion depending on which recension one follows. The First Concordance has been consulted. It does not address minor instruments and, per its ninth clause, does not address anything drafted after it.

Current status

Concordance 207 is not on loan and may not be removed from the East Aperture. Readers wishing to consult it must apply in writing and must state which clause they intend to rely upon. Applications naming clause 3 are held pending a determination of Schedule alpha, for which no date has been fixed.

The leaf was last examined in Year 5431 and found sound. The seal is chipped at the lower left. The schedule remains folded.