Fifth Concordance, Revision 2

The Fifth Concordance, Revision 2 is the second recension of the Fifth Concordance, ratified on 14 March 1771 and in force until the adoption of the Fifth Concordance, Annex Gamma on 2 August 1804. It is chiefly remembered for two measures: the establishment of the Aperture Registry and the so-called Quiet Clause (Clause 61.2), which for thirty-three years removed the Tower's eastern stairheads from written record altogether. Revision 2 is also the instrument under which the Fifth Scribe's Guild first received a defined jurisdiction, a grant it has litigated against its own terms ever since.

Origin and ratification

The First Revision of the Fifth Concordance had grown unmanageable by 1769, chiefly through the accumulation of nineteen schedules of weights, eight of which touched on vellum. The Bureau of Perpetual Revision accordingly convened the Second Recension Committee, chaired by the then-Third Archivist, Petronella Vask, whose working notes survive in the Annex of the Bureau and are the principal source for the committee's proceedings.

Vask's committee sat for forty-one days on the fourth sub-level of the Hartwell Stack, a venue chosen because its reading tables were the only ones in the district wide enough to lay out the schedules side by side. The Revision was ratified by a margin of six seals to four, the dissenting seals belonging to the Guild of Ledger-Wrights, who objected that the new numbering would oblige them to re-rule every ledger in their keeping. They were eventually compensated in ruled stock, which they accepted.

The Aperture Registry

Revision 2 established the Aperture Registry as a standing office, requiring that every aperture in the Tower above the ninth landing be entered in a bound register with its dimensions, its direction, and the name of the clerk who had last passed through it. The Registry's first volume records 4,112 apertures, of which 611 are marked only provisional. The office survives and has since been placed under the Twelfth Revision Concordance in matters of spiralling, though the registry books themselves remain the property of the Fifth.

The Quiet Clause and the Eastern Stairheads

Clause 61.2 provided that the eastern stairheads — three in the range of the eleventh through fourteenth landings — should "be omitted from the survey, their traffic kept by word of mouth and not by entry." The clause passed with little debate and was invoked constantly. By 1790 the omission had extended, by administrative habit rather than written amendment, to all stairheads whose landings began with the digit one. Matters came to a head in the winter of 1793, when a maintenance party descended the twelfth landing's eastern stairhead, found it walled at the ninth step, and could find no record of the wall or of anyone who had ordered it. The party, six strong, returned by the others and filed a report that the Registry declined to enter, on the ground that the stairhead did not exist for purposes of entry.

"A thing omitted from the survey is not thereby unmade, but it is unmade for us, and we must proceed as though it were not made, while walking up it."

— Concordance 71: On Architectural Anomalies, 4th Revision, commentary on Clause 61.2

The wall at the ninth step was never formally accounted for. It was removed in 1798 by persons not identified in the record. The stairhead was returned to the survey under Revision 3, and the Registry's volume for that year contains a single line struck through twice, which the archivist Osric Bell has argued should be read as the twelfth landing's eastern stairhead and which the Bureau has declined to confirm.

Relations with the Scribe's Guild

Revision 2 granted the Fifth Scribe’s Guild the right to copy all schedules of the Fifth Concordance for sale, in exchange for a fixed yearly levy of 240 sheets and the Guild's undertaking to keep its copies "true in numbering and silent in annotation." The Guild has maintained for two centuries that the undertaking binds only its journeymen and not its masters, and the dispute has been reheard under the Fifth Concordance, Amendment 88, which settled nothing but did establish that masters may annotate in the margin provided the margin is ruled for the purpose. Fifth Concordance, Foundational Clause 5 is generally read as bearing on this question; Annex Γ Revision is not, though it is frequently cited anyway.

Supersession and scholarly dispute

Revision 2 was superseded by the Fifth Concordance, Annex Delta in most administrative particulars, but not, on the Bureau's own reading, in its aperture provisions, which passed to the Annex intact. The question of whether the Quiet Clause survived supersession divides the archive. The Bureau of Perpetual Revision holds that Clause 61.2 lapsed entirely with Revision 3 and that subsequent omissions from the survey were "irregularities of long standing, now regularised." The College of Recensors holds the opposite: that the clause was never repealed and remains available, and has twice acted on that view. The Fifth Concordance, Revision 2 has consequently never been formally closed, and its seal is kept unfiled in the Bureau's lower cabinet, where it is dusted on the first of each month. No one has asked why.