Edict 2901-Ω/4

Edict 2901-Ω/4 is the standing instrument governing the rehearsal of edicts prior to their formal filing. Promulgated on Floor 2901 in the ninth session of the winter assizes, it establishes that no edict may be read aloud in a place where it has not first been read aloud, and sets out the sequence by which the second reading is to be understood as having preceded the first. It is the shortest instrument in the Ω series and the most frequently litigated per line.

Provisions

The edict runs to four clauses and a schedule. Clause 1 forbids the recitation of any unfiled edict before an audience of more than three, on the ground that an edict heard by four persons has acquired a public. Clause 2 permits such recitation to the Office of Anticipatory Readings, which is required to hear it and to record nothing. Clause 3 sets the interval between an anticipatory reading and a filed reading at no fewer than two and no more than the same two, which the schedule elaborates at length and to no evident purpose.

Clause 4, the operative clause, provides that where an edict is filed without an anticipatory reading, the filing office shall conduct the anticipatory reading afterward, endorse the file with the words "read before", and take no further note of the matter. This is the doctrine of retroactive prereading, and it has survived eleven challenges.

"The order in which a thing is heard does not alter what was heard, save where the hearing was the thing heard."

— Edict 2901-Ω/4, Schedule, note (c)

Relation to other instruments

Edict 2901-Ω/4 is subordinate to the Series Ω edict of which it forms a part, and it is read together with the Filing of Edict procedure, whose Annex 9 defers to it expressly. It is not to be confused with Edict 45-A, the Edict of Luminous Allocation, which governs the allocation of light to filing rooms and does not concern recitation. The distinction was drawn sharply in 4110 after the Office of Anticipatory Readings attempted to claim lamp-hours under the Luminous Allocation on the strength of a reading it had not conducted; the Precedence Edict was invoked, and the claim failed.

The edict is also cited in the recensions of Edict 411-γ, but the citation is widely held to be a scribal intrusion from the adjacent page of the register, and no clause of 411-γ depends upon it.

The Winter Recitations and the grievance of Clerk Ondrast

The edict's reputation rests on the Winter Recitations of 4108, when the anticipatory readings scheduled for Floors 2902 through 2909 were displaced by a burst pipe and conducted, under Clause 4, after the edicts had been filed and circulated. The endorsements were made. The edicts stood. The readings were then held over nine evenings to audiences of the original three persons, each of whom had already read the edicts in their filed form and sought clarification of things the filed form had settled.

It was in the aftermath that a clerk of the second scriptorium, Ondrast of Floor 2906, lodged the grievance for which the edict is now chiefly remembered. Ondrast had performed the anticipatory reading of No. 2901-Ω/4 itself, alone, on the night before its promulgation, to satisfy Clause 2. He did not record it, as Clause 2 requires. When the file later came up for audit, no record existed, and the reading was ruled not to have occurred. Ondrast argued that the absence of a record was the record, and that his compliance had been perfect. The office held that an unrecorded compliance is indistinguishable from an omission and could not be endorsed. Ondrast's endorsement was withheld. He served out his term in the second scriptorium and is recorded in the staff register as having read nothing further.

Scholarly dispute

The principal disagreement concerns whether Clause 4 describes an actual reading or a documentary substitute. The Concordance of Read-Order, Annex 2, treats the post-filing reading as real and insists that the three hearers must be persons who have not previously encountered the edict — a condition impossible to satisfy once the edict has been filed and posted, as the Concordance of Posted Instruments observes with some dryness. The Concordance of Posted Instruments, Section 6, holds instead that the endorsement alone constitutes the reading and that Clause 4 is a form of words by which the Tower declines to admit an irregularity it has already forgiven.

A third position, advanced by the Office of Anticipatory Readings in its annual memorandum for 4112, argues that both Concordances mistake the edict's purpose, which was never to secure a first hearing but to secure a second one, and that the whole apparatus exists so that every edict may be heard twice by no one in particular.

Practical notes

The edict is read in full at the opening of each session of the Filing of Edict board, and the reading is not recorded. Copies are held in the second scriptorium on Floor 2901; the second scriptorium does not lend beyond the floor. Chairs in the reading rooms where anticipatory readings are conducted are fixed to the floor and may not be moved to accommodate additional hearers, which is the practical means by which the limit of three is enforced. The original instrument is in good condition, save for a stain on Clause 2 of a kind the conservators decline to identify.