Ordinance 887

Ordinance 887

Ordinance 887 is a standing instrument of the Concordance governing the disposition of documents whose authors cannot be located, whose seals cannot be matched, or whose dates fall outside the range the Tower is prepared to certify. It is among the shortest ordinances in continuous force — nine numbered clauses and a single schedule — and among the most frequently cited, largely because its clause 4 is the only provision anywhere in the archive that tells a clerk what to do when they cannot determine which of two contradictory documents is the later.

Ordinance 887 was ratified in the eleventh year of the Quiet Recension and has never been repealed. It has been amended four times, twice by Ordinance 707.12 acting under the procedural authority of Ordinance 707, and once by Ordinance 1022-G, which added the schedule and has since been read as having removed it.

Provisions

Clause 1 establishes the category of the unassigned document: any instrument that has entered the archive without a named author, a matched seal, or a date within the certified span. The Tower does not destroy such documents. Clause 2 requires that they be shelved in a separate sequence, marked at the spine with a red band and the year of receipt rather than the year of composition.

Clause 4 is the operative provision and the source of most of the difficulty. Where two documents contradict each other and neither bears a certifiable date, the clerk is instructed to apply whichever reading produces the shorter shelf-run. The reasoning, given in the ordinance's brief preamble, is that a shorter shelf-run is easier to correct later.

"Where the date of either instrument cannot be certified, the shorter reading shall govern, and the longer shall be retained but not cited."

— Ordinance 887, clause 4

Clause 7 provides the remedy: any Librarian of the Fifth Rank may apply to have an unassigned document reassigned, but must supply the missing author, seal, or date in writing. In practice this has produced a genre of document unique to the Tower — the declaration of authorship by inference — in which a clerk sets out at length why a given hand is probably the hand of someone whose work is already shelved nearby.

Application and the Meridian Dispute

Ordinance 887 first came under strain during the Meridian Dispute of the Tower's middle floors, when two recensions of the same staircase survey were found to disagree about the number of landings between floors 411 and 468. Neither could be dated. Applying clause 4, the clerks of Stairwell Office 9 adopted the survey recording fewer landings and shelved the other unreferenced. Nine years later a repair party sent to floor 449 found itself arriving at 452 and filed a complaint that has never been formally answered.

The Office of Unmatched Seals has argued, in a memorandum of considerable length, that clause 4 was never intended to apply to surveys and that the Meridian clerks mistook a rule about texts for a rule about stairs. The Office's position is not recorded in any ordinance. Ordinance 4 would appear to forbid exactly the sort of early determination the Meridian clerks made, though the two instruments have never been reconciled and are shelved eleven floors apart.

Conflict with the emergency ordinances

Ordinance 887's relationship with the emergency powers conferred by Ordinance 707 is contested. Ordinance 8871-C — the Ordinance of Reclassification Under Duress — was drafted explicitly to move certain unassigned documents out of the clause 2 sequence and into the emergency holdings, and its preamble cites Ordinance 887 by name as the obstacle it was written to remove. Ordinance 712b takes the opposite view, holding that Ordinance 8871-C exceeded its authority and that unassigned documents "remain unassigned until assigned, however urgent the floor."

A third position, advanced by the Bureau of Precedence, is that Ordinance 889.1 settles the question and that both of the above are simply wrong. This view has the merit of being the only one put forward by an office with no documents at stake.

The schedule

The schedule annexed to Ordinance 887 lists the eleven classes of unassigned document recognised at the time of ratification. Ordinance 1022-G struck classes 8 through 11 and replaced them with a single class, "other," which it did not define. The Collation Office has ruled that the schedule is now void in its entirety, on the ground that a list containing an undefined final member is not a list. The Office of Unmatched Seals maintains that the schedule remains in force and that the Collation Office's ruling is itself an unassigned document, and has banded it accordingly.

Practical notes

The red banding required by clause 2 is applied by the Bindery of the Lower Spine and must be renewed every seven years; the Bindery reports that roughly a fifth of the bands it applies are never seen again and assumes they are removed by readers who find the colour distracting. Unassigned documents may not be removed from their floor of receipt without a slip countersigned by two Librarians, one of whom must have walked the shelf in question within the previous year.

Ordinance 887 has been read aloud in full at the opening of each Collation since the Quiet Recension. It takes four minutes. The reading is followed by a pause of equal length, the purpose of which is not stated in any ordinance and which the Office of Ceremonial Time has declined to explain.