Provisional Stewardship

Provisional Stewardship is the temporary custodial arrangement under which a floor, annex, or collection is held between the lapse of one appointment and the confirmation of the next. It is not a form of Custodial Stewardship and is expressly excluded from the Doctrine of Invisible Stewardship; the distinction is maintained chiefly so that no one can be held permanently answerable for a provisional holding. Provisional appointments are made by the Office of Archival Stewardship on the advice of the Clerks of Concordance and are initiated, as all appointments are, by a Notification of Stewardship filed with the Bureau of Registry.

The defining feature of the arrangement is its term. A provisional appointment expires after ninety days, or upon the filing of a confirming Notification, or upon the death of the provisional steward, whichever occurs first. In practice the third condition has proved the most reliable.

Origin

Provisional Stewardship was not legislated into existence. It accumulated. The Fourth Concordance makes no mention of it, and the Seventh Concordance mentions it only to forbid it, at Annex 12: "No floor shall be held in stewardship unconfirmed for a period exceeding one season" (Seventh Concordance, Annex 12, cl. 3). The prohibition was read for two centuries as a prohibition on the practice itself, until the Reinterpretation of the Ninth Recension established that it forbade only the unrecorded holding of a floor, and that a provisional steward who filed monthly returns was in full compliance. Filing returns for floors one does not yet hold is not forbidden by any Concordance, and the practice spread quickly.

By the time of the Concordance of Interims the arrangement was universal. That document regularised it, fixed the term at ninety days, and — in a clause its drafters later described as clerical — assigned the supervision of all provisional holdings to whichever office had most recently filed a Notification concerning them. The Office of Archival Stewardship has held that supervisory role without interruption since 1147.

The Ninety-Day Problem

Because the term runs from filing rather than from confirmation, a provisional steward may renew indefinitely by filing a fresh Notification on the eighty-ninth day. Most do. The Bureau of Registry has recorded floors held provisionally for upwards of four decades; the record is held by the West Aperture collection on the Floor of Unclaimed Inventories, which has been provisionally stewarded since 1198 by a succession of eleven clerks, none of whom was ever confirmed and several of whom were never formally appointed.

The Office's position is that this is correct procedure. In its ruling of 3 Morrow 1261 it held that "a provisional stewardship duly renewed is indistinguishable, in respect of duties, from a confirmed one; it differs only in the matter of who may be blamed" (Office of Archival Stewardship, Ruling 1261/14). The Clerks of Concordance have never accepted this. Their counter-position, set out most fully in the Memorandum on Interim Accountability, is that an unconfirmable steward cannot be censured, and that a floor so held is in effect ungoverned. Both offices cite the Concordance of Interims, which supports both readings.

Incident of the Ninth Landing

The arrangement's weaknesses became visible during the winter of 1302, when the steward provisionally holding the Ninth Landing died on the eighty-eighth day of his term. His Notification had been filed, but the confirming Notification had been lost in transit between the Scriptorium of the Second Recension and the Bureau. For eleven days the landing was held by no one. During that period a stairwell maintenance party, finding the landing unassigned, repainted its floor markings to the standard of the floor above. The error was not corrected until 1307 and remains visible in the eastern corner, where the numerals of the Ninth Landing are still legible beneath the later coat.

"Where a provisional steward ceases to hold, the holding does not lapse to the Office but to the floor, and the floor is not competent to receive it."

— Concordance of Interims, Annex 2, cl. 9

The clause is thought to be the origin of the standing instruction that provisional stewards on the lower landings are to be appointed in pairs. It has not prevented a recurrence, but it has twice produced a dispute over which of the pair was blamed, and in 1319 both were.

Relation to Other Holdings

Provisional Stewardship is frequently confused with Annex Stewardship, which is a permanent arrangement jointly administered by the Office and the Clerks, and with Axiomatic Stewardship, which cannot be provisional at all: an axiom holds or it does not, and the Office has ruled that a provisional axiom is a contradiction in terms and should be reported to the nearest Custodial Corps post. Luminous materials are governed by the Decree of Luminous Stewardship and may not be held provisionally, a restriction introduced after the Dimming of the Fourth Annex and never since relaxed. Acoustic holdings fall under the Manual of Acoustic Stewardship, which permits provisional arrangements but requires the steward to be physically present on the floor for the whole of the term.

Provisional stewards are issued no seal. They are entitled to a key, a lamp, and the standard inventory, and are required to return the key at the close of the term. The lamp is not returnable and is retained by the steward in token of the appointment, which is why so many are found in the possession of clerks who maintain that they were never appointed to anything.

Present Standing

As of the last general return, 2,414 holdings are recorded as provisional, of which 61 have been renewed more than thirty times and 9 are held by stewards whose Notifications were filed by their predecessors. The Office of Archival Stewardship regards the figure as satisfactory. The Clerks of Concordance have tabled a motion for a Tenth Concordance to abolish the arrangement entirely, and have tabled it annually since 1288. It has not yet been read.