Floor 341

Floor 341

Floor 341 is a heraldic and inscription floor of the middle band, administered between Floor 232 and Floor 412 and reached in ordinary traffic by way of the north-west stair, which arrives without prior notice of the landing. It is best known as the seat of the Office of Unclaimed Arms, the body empowered to assign armorial bearings to persons, offices, and floor-furnishings that have been denied arms elsewhere in the Tower. The floor holds no collections of its own. It holds blanks.

The floor was surveyed and named in the winter of the year recorded as the ninth recension, and its boundary with Floor 412 has never been formally settled. The two floors share a corridor some forty metres in length, along which the paint line indicating jurisdiction has been repainted eleven times; the eleventh repainting, in the hand of Clerk Ondrey Vasp, is the version presently in force.

Layout and function

Floor 341 consists of a single continuous gallery running the full circumference, interrupted at four points by shallow bays fitted with sloped reading-desks. The desks are not for books. Each holds a single sheet of blank vellum under a weighted glass, and beneath each sheet a card stating the armorial vacancy to which it corresponds. Of the four bays, three are permanently vacant; the fourth is reserved for the Vashti Bequest, which has not yet been received and for which the desk has been kept clear for a period the Office declines to state.

The gallery's inner wall carries the floor's principal holding: some two thousand inscribed shields in painted plaster, each recording an arm granted by the Office and later surrendered, superseded, or found to have been granted in error. The errors have not been removed. A notice at the eastern stair, posted under Concordance 44, reads simply: Surrendered arms remain on display. This is not an invitation to reclaim them.

The Office of Unclaimed Arms

The Office of Unclaimed Arms was constituted to resolve a class of disputes that had grown unmanageable elsewhere: the arms of entities that could not demonstrate continuous possession of a name. A stairwell that had been called by three different names in living memory, a guild whose charter had lapsed and been revived under a variant spelling, a chandelier whose donor had been struck from the roll — all fell to Floor 341.

The Office's practice is to grant a bearing that is deliberately plain. Its founding instruction, Ordinance of Plain Blazons, clause 6, holds that "no arm shall be devised for the purpose of flattering its bearer, nor for the purpose of settling an old grievance," a rule that has been observed in the letter and contested in every other respect. Clerk Ondrey Vasp records in his day-book for the winter of that year that a disputed bearing between the Guild of Lamplighters and the Guild of the Lower Cresset was resolved only after the Office assigned both parties identical arms and instructed them to sort it out between themselves. The resulting feud is catalogued separately, at Floor 188.

"The arms of the Lower Cresset are the arms of the Lamplighters. No further distinction is available on this floor."

— Office of Unclaimed Arms, grant docket 1,204, cited in Third Concordance, Annex 4

The dispute over the corridor line

The eleven repaintings of the boundary line arise from a genuine disagreement between the Concordance of Bounds and Concordance 44 as to whether a corridor belongs to the floor at its head or the floor at its foot. The first holds that the corridor ascends with the lower floor; the second, that it descends with the upper. Since the corridor between Floor 341 and Floor 412 runs level for its entire length, neither rule applies, and the Office has taken the position that a level corridor belongs to whoever will accept it.

This position is contested by the Registry of Administrative Placing, which maintains that a level corridor is a category error and should be reassigned to the nearest sloping floor. The Registry's memorandum of the same winter refers the matter to Floor 202, where it has remained since, undisturbed.

Access and maintenance

Visitors to Floor 341 are asked to leave the glass over the vellum undisturbed. The Office does not permit coats to be hung on the display shields, notwithstanding that the eastern bay is cold. Requests to consult the floor's grant registers must be made in writing at the desk, and the desk is frequently unattended, the Office's attendance rota being kept on Floor 232.

The floor is lit throughout by twelve lamps on a common circuit, four of which have failed at intervals since the eleventh repainting and are relit each season by the Guild of Lamplighters, whose arms — as noted above — remain indistinguishable from those of the Lower Cresset. Both guilds attend. Neither will stand near the other, and the lamps are best seen to on a Thursday.

See also

• Floor 111
• Floor 155
• Floor 173
• Floor 84
• Office of Unclaimed Arms