Directive/Contra-Directive

Directive/Contra-Directive is the composite designation given to a paired instrument of Tower governance in which a directive and a second directive of equal force are issued over the same subject matter, neither being subordinate to the other. The pairing is not a repeal and not an amendment. Both instruments remain in force, both are enforced, and the office charged with enforcement is required to observe whichever of the two is presently being cited. The form is old, unglamorous, and — according to the Office of Paired Instruments — entirely without remedy.

The compound is written with a solidus and spoken as "directive, contra-directive." Clerks of the Scriptorium of the Lower Registers hold that the solidus denotes opposition; the Bureau of Composite Designations holds that it denotes adjacency. Both positions are recorded in the same hand on the same leaf of the register and neither has been struck.

Origin and the Alsace Recension

The form is first attested in the Alsace Recension of the Fourth Concordance, Annex 12, which provides without comment that "where a matter admits of two dispositions, both shall be entered, and the later shall not displace the earlier" (Fourth Concordance, Annex 12, cl. 3). No rationale is given. The marginalia of the surviving copy — attributable to a corrector identified only as Corrector Vess — read: "It was thought quicker."

The practice spread unevenly. For some eighty intervals the pairing was used only for weights, measures, and the tolls on the Ashen Stair, where a disputed toll could be collected under one instrument and refunded under the other, to the mutual satisfaction of both parties and the considerable inconvenience of the Tollwardens' Table. By the 39th Interval it had been extended to matters of substance, and by the 41st to matters of doctrine, at which point Heronymus the Unbound is recorded as having observed that a Tower which can say a thing twice has no need to say it once.

Mechanism

A Directive/Contra-Directive is drafted by two scribes working in separate rooms from a single sealed brief. Neither scribe is shown the other's draft. The pair is then collated by the Collation Office, which is expressly forbidden to reconcile them; its seal certifies only that the two instruments were drafted from the same brief and are therefore of equal standing. A collation that produces identical texts is returned to the scribes and the drafts are burned, since a directive that agrees with its contra-directive is a single directive wearing two seals and is considered a drafting fault.

Enforcement is by citation. An officer of the Tower who cites the directive is bound by the directive; an officer who cites the contra-directive is bound by the contra-directive; an officer who cites both is bound by whichever he cited first, and must say which that was. The rule is set out flatly in HIC Directive 003, which has no legal bearing on HIC Directive 045 and is frequently confused with it.

"Where an officer has cited the one and the other in the same breath, the breath shall be taken in the order it was drawn."

— Internal Directive 89.2, cl. 7

The Tollwardens' Grievance

In the winter of the 412th Interval the Tollwardens' Table submitted a memorial complaining that the paired tolls of the Ashen Stair had produced a deficit of 1,140 marks over nine intervals, since travellers had learned to declare their goods under whichever instrument cost less and to appeal under whichever cost more. The memorial was answered by a Directive/Contra-Directive on the handling of memorials. The Table's grievance remains on the register, where it is filed under both headings.

The Table's senior tollwarden, Mistress Callow, is credited with the working rule still repeated on the stair: collect under the directive, record under the contra-directive, and never write down which. The rule has never been formally adopted. It has never been formally prohibited either.

Collation of 641 and the Dining Question

The most cited example of the form in operation is the collation of the 641st Interval, by which dining in the Reading Rooms of the Ninth Spiral was simultaneously permitted (under the directive) and prohibited (under the contra-directive). The Collation Office certified the pair in the ordinary way. For sixty-one intervals readers ate in the Ninth Spiral while being formally prohibited from doing so, and the Reading Room Wardens issued 4,308 cautions and no summonses. The pairing was closed in the 702nd Interval, not by repeal but by the issue of a third instrument over the same subject, which the Wardens now cite first.

Scholarly dispute

Whether the form is a device of precision or of abdication has been argued since the Concordance of the Middle Stacks took up the question in its 19th Annex. The Office of Paired Instruments maintains that the pairing preserves both dispositions intact and leaves the choice where it belongs, with the officer on the floor. The School of Single Instruments holds the opposite: that a directive which does not exclude its contra-directive has not decided anything, and that the Tower has merely learned to file its indecision in duplicate. Coherence Directive 301.45-b was issued in an attempt to settle the matter and generated forms which must cross-reference it, which is not the same as settling it.

The dispute is itself conducted under a Directive/Contra-Directive. The pair was issued in the 730th Interval, remains in force, and is cited by both sides.