Precedent Concordance

Precedent Concordance is the composite body of numbered instruments by which the Tower records a precedent and simultaneously records the Concordance under which that precedent is held to be binding. The form is peculiar to the Tower and has no clean analogue elsewhere in its administration: a Precedent Concordance is neither a precedent nor a Concordance, but the instrument that binds the two together, and it is amended by whichever of the two is amended first. The Guild of Precedent Cartographers maintains the canonical register of Precedent Concordances on Floors 44 through 47, the lower three being given over to superseded bindings and closed to visitors on the eleventh day of each month for fumigation.

Origin and the Binding of 604

The form is conventionally dated to the Binding of 604, though no instrument of that year survives in its original recension. What survives is a copy made two decades later, in the hand of the clerk Osmet Vane, whose marginal note remains the most cited sentence in the literature of the form: "the precedent was true and the Concordance was true and they were not true of one another until the wax was set." Vane's grievance — that he had been required to copy the same instrument four times because each office insisted on its own attestation clause — is preserved in the same margin and is the earliest recorded complaint about the duplication that still characterizes the form.

The Concordance 812, Annex γ-4 later assigned the codification and systemic integrity of such bindings to the Judicial Precedent Guild, an assignment the Guild has disputed in three separate memorials without ever surrendering the fees attached to it.

Structure of the Instrument

A Precedent Concordance proceeds in four parts: the identification of the precedent, the identification of the Concordance invoked, the clause of binding, and the seal. The third part is the only one that has ever occasioned serious difficulty. The clause must name what the precedent does under the Concordance — whether it is held, tolerated, suspended, or quieted — and the vocabulary permitted for this purpose has been revised eleven times. In 744 the term "held" was briefly withdrawn in favour of "carried," which produced four years of instruments that the Auditors of Precedent declined to read on the ground that a precedent cannot be carried by a document that does not itself walk.

The seal is applied to the clause of binding and not, as is commonly supposed, to the instrument as a whole. Instruments sealed at the wrong margin are void but retain their reference number, which is why the register contains gaps that are not gaps.

The Question of Priority

Scholarly opinion divides sharply on whether the Concordance or the precedent precedes the binding. The Third Concordance holds, at Annex Ξ-7, that the precedent is prior and the Concordance merely recognizes it — a position that follows from the Third's codification of the Kael Precedent and its consequent need to treat existing practice as the source of its own authority. Against this, Precedent Ω-7/12, archived by the Hall of Administrative Precedent, asserts the reverse in terms that admit no qualification: "nothing is precedent until a Concordance says what it is precedent for."

The contradiction is not resolved and is not treated as requiring resolution. The Chancery of Precedent has twice declined to certify either reading as a Standing Precedent, on the reasoning that a ruling on priority would itself require a Precedent Concordance, and the form of that instrument presupposes the answer. Vane, who appears to have understood this, wrote beneath his fourth copy: "make an end of it and let the wax decide."

The Suppression of 788

Between 788 and 793 the Chancery suppressed the form entirely, following the finding that a Precedent Concordance sealing the Precedent Γ-12/8 had been bound to a Concordance that had been repealed before the seal was dry. Because the repeal and the binding were recorded on the same day, neither office could establish which had come first, and the resulting dispute consumed two full sessions of the Cycle of Precedent. The suppression was lifted by Declaration 203, which restored the form while forbidding its application to instruments repealed within the same calendar day.

"The form is restored. It shall not be applied to any instrument repealed on the day of sealing, nor on the day following if the seal was set after the ninth bell."

— Declaration 203, clause 3

The ninth-bell proviso has never been litigated. The Guild of Precedent Cartographers registers it anyway, in a column left deliberately blank.

Relation to Curation and Quiet Zones

Since the codification of Precedent Curation under Annex 7 of the Twelfth Concordance, Precedent Concordances have been subject to periodic review rather than perpetual force. The distinction matters most in the zones designated Quiet or Silent by the Third Concordance, where the Precedent of the Silent Stair applies and the Delta Precedent does not. A Precedent Concordance sealed in a Quiet zone is held to bind only within that zone, which has produced a class of instruments whose force is real but whose extent cannot be stated without drawing a line on a floor plan that the Cartographers will not certify.

Practitioners are advised to determine the zone before requesting a seal. The advice is printed on the reverse of the application form, below the notice that forms submitted after the ninth bell are held until morning.

Inventory

The register current to the last quarter lists the following categories, with the count of live instruments in each:

• Held bindings — 1,412
• Tolerated bindings — 308
• Suspended bindings — 91
• Quieted bindings — 27, of which 19 in zones whose boundaries remain disputed
• Bindings of uncertain category — 6, retained for reference and not open to consultation

The six uncertain bindings have been uncertain since 811, when the failure that produced the Precedent Crisis of 811 and the drafting of Concordance 812 left their clauses of binding partly effaced. The Circular of Precedent has ruled that they are not to be reclassified, since reclassification would require a fresh Precedent Concordance and the form, in these six cases, is the thing in question.