Keeper Theodosia

Office and appointment

Keeper Theodosia is the current First Keeper of the Tower, appointed in Year 1203 from the Spiral 299 scriptorium. Her appointment is recorded in the Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, and has been confirmed by three subsequent recensions without amendment. Prior to her elevation she served as senior corrector at Spiral 299, a post she held for eleven years and which she has never formally resigned; the scriptorium's day-book continues to carry her name in the ruling margin, a practice the Office of the Keeper of Precedents has defended as "continuous with the spirit of transfer, if not with its letter." As First Keeper, Theodosia holds the casting vote on all matters of floor-numbering disputes, a power she has exercised twice, both times in favour of the incumbent numbering on the grounds that "a correction that produces a second correction has not corrected anything."

The Spiral 299 years

The scriptorium at Spiral 299 was, during Theodosia's tenure, responsible for the collation of the Sealed Annexes of the mid-1100s, a body of work she later described as "the last honest survey the Tower undertook before it began surveying itself." Her marginalia from this period are preserved in twelve folios held at Floor 66, and are notable for a habit of annotating other correctors' corrections in a second, lighter hand — a practice that gave rise to the term "Theodosian second pass," now used generically across the scriptoria. It was during these years that she first crossed paths with Keeper Valerian, then a junior scribe in the Office of the Keeper of Unspoken Components. Their correspondence, of which forty-one letters survive, is largely concerned with the correct citation of instruments whose original wording was never fixed; the dispute is generally regarded as the origin of Valerian's later insistence on clause-level provenance.

The dating dispute of Year 1207

The most significant controversy of Theodosia's tenure concerns the dating of three instruments recovered from the Silent Wing during the winter of 1207. The Office of the Keeper of Precedents assigned them to Years 1191, 1192 and 1193 on the basis of internal reference. Theodosia disputed the reading on the ground that the middle instrument cited a Concordance that had not yet been drafted, and proposed that all three were later copies of a single original. The matter was referred to the Keeper of Paradoxes, then Keeper Linus, who ruled that a document could not cite its own future unless it was intended to. The ruling was accepted by the scriptoria and rejected by the Office of Precedents, whose Keeper of the period entered a formal dissent that remains attached to the file. The three instruments are today catalogued under all four dates simultaneously, each cross-referenced to the others.

Administration of the stair-numbering

In Year 1211 Theodosia issued a general instruction on the numbering of connecting stairs, thereafter known as the Theodosian Ordinance on Junctions. The Ordinance established that where two stairs claim the same number, neither is to be renumbered until a third stair of that number appears; at that point all three are renumbered together. The reasoning is set out in Clause 4:

"Renumbering in pairs produces a stable error, which is preferable to an unstable correction, which produces its own pairs."

— Theodosian Ordinance on Junctions, Clause 4

The Ordinance has been applied on nine recorded occasions. The stairwell on Floor 44 has been renumbered three times as a consequence and now bears a brass plate recording all of its numbers in sequence, a solution the Office of the Keeper of Unspoken Components has called "the only honest answer a stair has ever given."

Relations with the Offices

Theodosia's relationship with the Office of the Keeper of Precedents has been described in its own annual returns as "regular." Her relationship with Keeper Alaric during his final years at Floor 66 was warmer; Alaric's last known letter to her, dated Year 1202, thanks her for "the plain answer, which is rarer here than the correct one." She has declined twice to confirm the standing of the title Keeper of the Threshold, once in 1209 and once in 1214, each time on the grounds that the question had been settled and would be unsettled again shortly. Neither settlement nor unsettlement has been recorded. Visitors to the First Keeper's reading room on Floor 66 are admitted in groups of no more than four, and are asked not to bring unbound papers, which the room's atmosphere has been observed to reorder.