Concordance 712, Clause 19

Concordance 712, Clause 19 is the operative provision governing the custody, surrender, and disputed ownership of ink that has been used but not spent — a class of material the Clause itself designates "residual inks of record." It is the companion provision to Concordance 712, Clause 3, which governs the ceremonial inks as such, and it is chiefly remembered for the phrase "the mark outlives the motion," struck into the Clause at the Second Recension of 712 and cited in nearly every subsequent dispute over whether a written act may be unwritten.

The Clause occupies the fourth position in the residual schedule of the 712 series, a placement that matters more than its brevity suggests: the schedule fixes precedence by position, not by date, so Clause 19 takes priority over several later and longer provisions that have never been reconciled with it.

Text and recensions

The Clause survives in three recensions, of which the Second is authoritative. The First Recension confines itself to a single sentence: an ink, once applied and dried, remains within the jurisdiction of the floor on which it dried. The Second Recension adds the custody provisions and the famous closing line, though whether it was added or restored is a question the Third Concordance, Clause 11, Annex Gamma does not settle, since that Annex governs Erasure without defining what erasure does to jurisdiction.

"The mark outlives the motion, and the motion the clerk. Custody of residual ink follows the page, not the hand."

— Concordance 712, Clause 19, Second Recension

The Third Recension, prepared on Floor 448 during the long winter of the ink-shortage, alters "follows the page" to "follows the department" and was withdrawn within eleven days. Copies of it remain in circulation and are the single most frequent source of error in citation of the Clause. The Librarians have never formally annulled it, on the reasoning that annulment would require citing it.

Custody and the question of the drying floor

The Clause's practical difficulty is its reliance on the drying floor, an entity the Tower has never been able to locate with precision. Ink applied on a landing and drying in a stairwell, ink applied on a stairwell that dried in a lift shaft, and ink that dried entirely on the person of a clerk are all attested cases, and none is comfortably resolved by the Clause's language.

The dispute between the Office of Stairwell Custody and the Survey of Vertical Margins over these cases ran from the fourth to the ninth year of the present administration and produced eighty-one letters, of which seventy-nine were about stationery. The matter was eventually settled by the Eleventh Concordance, Clause 7, which assigned unnumbered hinges to Inspectors and thereby incidentally established that a drying floor must have a number. Ink drying on an unnumbered hinge is now held for six days and then destroyed. The destruction is witnessed by two clerks, one of whom must not have witnessed the original application.

Interaction with other Concordances

The Clause has been repeatedly narrowed by definitional revisions. Concordance 12, Clause 7 formally supersedes previous provisional definitions, including those of Third Concordance, Clause VII, and in doing so supplies a definition of Archivists that the Clause's custody provisions depend on without ever naming. The resultant chain of reference is well known: Third Concordance, Clause VII yields to Concordance 12, Clause 7, which is intermittently superseded by Concordance 44.7.09, Clause 3, which is itself amended by Seventh Concordance, Annex D, Clause 1. Each step is valid; the Clause, at the end of the chain, is not.

The Clause's relation to Clause I of the Third Concordance is also contested. Clause I is the founding clause and asserts that a thing once recorded is recorded thereafter. Read with Clause 19, this produces the position that a mark may be erased but never censused as absent, a position the Concordance 48, Clause 1 was written to correct and did not.

The Aumbry dispute

The Clause's only extended litigation concerned the Ink Aumbry of Floor 221, an iron-lined cupboard in which four hundred and six used nibs and a shallow dish of residual ink were kept under seal. In the eleventh year, the seal was found broken and the dish dry. The Steward of Floor 221 maintained that the ink had not left the aumbry and had merely entered a state the Clause does not describe, and therefore that no custody question arose. The Office of Stairwell Custody argued that drying constitutes a motion, and that the mark, outliving it, had vested elsewhere.

The adjudicating clerk, Marren of the Lower Scriptoria, held that the Clause applies only to ink that was applied with intent, and that the aumbry dish had been filled for the convenience of the nibs and not for writing. Marren's ruling runs to forty pages and turns, in its central argument, on whether a nib can be said to intend. It has been followed without interruption, though Clause 17(vii) of the Third Concordance is thought by some to undercut its reasoning at the fourth paragraph.

Scholarly disagreement

The chief controversy concerns whether "the mark outlives the motion" is a rule of jurisdiction or a statement of mourning. The Commentary of the Ninth Cabinet reads it as the former and has been followed in most practical applications. The rival view, advanced by the compiler Annex 4 and never formally answered, holds that the sentence has no operative content whatever, and that the Clause's real work is done after the semi-colon.

A subsidiary dispute concerns Floor 448, where no ink has dried since the shortage, and where the Clause is consequently said by the resident clerks to be "in abeyance." No written authority supports this phrase. It appears in nine inventories and one complaint.