Concordant Stewardship

Concordant Stewardship is the body of practice and precedent by which stewardship appointments within the Tower are brought into harmony with the numbered Concordant Laws and the recensions of the Curia of Concordant Interpretation. It is distinct from Custodial Stewardship, which concerns the appointment and oversight of the Custodial Corps, and from Annex Stewardship, which governs the holding of particular annexes. Concordant Stewardship is administered in parallel by the Office of Archival Stewardship and the Clerks of Concordance, with disputes referred to the Office of Concordant Arbitration.

Origins and Early Recensions

The first explicit reference to Concordant Stewardship appears in the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which records that "no stewardship shall be held valid wherein the appointing instrument contradicts a standing Concordance, save where the contradiction is itself concordant." This formula, though never defined, became the root principle of the discipline. The Office of Concordant Interpretation holds that the phrase "itself concordant" refers to a subsequent and superior Concordance; the Bureau of Concordant Reconciliation maintains, by contrast, that it describes a stewardship which has persisted unchallenged for no fewer than forty Tower-years.

Prior to the Decree of Luminous Stewardship, luminous annexes were held under the Doctrine of Invisible Stewardship, and Concordant Stewardship as then practised required no visible instrument. The Decree replaced that practice for notifications governing luminous materials, and the Notification of Stewardship became the standard visible instrument in such cases.

Instruments and Procedure

A stewardship appointment under Concordant Stewardship is initiated by a Notification of Stewardship, issued by Librarians and filed with the Bureau of Registry. The Office of Archival Stewardship then issues a Custodial Mandate — among them Custodial Mandate 117 and Custodial Directive 743-A — to formalise the custodial dimensions. Stairwells giving access to the stewarded floor remain under Stairwell Stewardship regardless of the appointment.

On Floor 1192-Δ, in the winter of the 884th Tower-year, a Notification was filed describing the appointee as "the under-clerk presently asleep in the eastern scriptorium." The Office of Concordant Arbitration ruled the appointment void, not for imprecision, but because the eastern scriptorium on that floor had burned in the 611th Tower-year and contained no sleeping clerk. The appointee was nevertheless entered into the registry and was not removed until the Forty Eighth Concordance established the Department of Dimensional Stewardship.

Principal Offices

The Office of Archival Stewardship jointly administers Annex Stewardship with the Clerks of Concordance and governs Custodial Stewardship through its mandated corps. The Clerks of Concordance maintain the running concordance of contradictions, a volume last recensed by Clerk Alluthe of the Narrow Stair, who recorded a grievance that "the Forty Eighth Concordance cites a decree that the curia insists was never decreed, and the curia's insistence is filed under the wrong annex."

The Curia of Concordant Interpretation issues binding recensions, though these are frequently amended by later Concordances. The Office of Concordant Arbitration settles disputes between stewards; its rulings are collected in the Type 1: Concordant Reconciliation series.

Scholarly Disagreement

A long-standing dispute concerns the status of the Decree of Conveyance, which descends from the Decree of Luminous Stewardship. The Office of Concordant Interpretation holds that conveyance of a stewardship across floors requires a new Notification under the later Decree. The Bureau of Concordant Reconciliation, citing the Third Concordance, argues that conveyance is concordant where the original Notification "names the stairwell and not the floor." The Manual of Acoustic Stewardship adds, without citation, that conveyance by whisper is invalid on floors above 900.

"A stewardship concordant on one floor may be discordant on the next, and the stairwell between them is the only court that does not lie."

— Manual of Acoustic Stewardship, Recension 12, Clause 3

Incidents and Anomalies

In the 902nd Tower-year, the Department of Dimensional Stewardship discovered that three stewards appointed under Concordant Stewardship occupied the same dimensionless annex on Floor 0-Σ. The Office of Concordant Arbitration resolved the overlap by ruling that only the steward who had filed a Notification in the shortest hand was concordant; the others were demoted to under-clerks. Visiting clerks are prohibited from counting the stewards aloud in that annex, as the count has on two recorded occasions exceeded three and then reverted.

The Concordant Verification office conducts periodic audits of stewards' concordance. Its 11th audit found that Floor 447-B had been stewarded under a Concordance that the Curia of Concordant Interpretation had repealed before the appointment, a condition the auditors termed "retro-discordant" and resolved by backdating the repeal.