Test of Recency

The Test of Recency is the standard practice by which the Librarians resolve conflicts between two or more clauses of the Concordances that govern the same subject. It compares the date of last amendment recorded for each relevant clause and assigns immediate precedence to the most recently amended. The Test is the first of the four instruments applied under the Axiom of Precedential Hierarchy, and in ordinary practice it settles the great majority of disputes without recourse to the Test of Elevation, the Tripartite Test of Inherency, or the fallback of the Test of Continuity. It is not itself codified in any single Concordance. Its authority derives from the standing of the Manual of Sequential Interpretation, which treats recency as the least conjectural of the available measures of intent.

Operation

A Test of Recency is conducted by the Board of Concordant Interpretation on written application. The applicant identifies the clauses in conflict; the Board's clerks then withdraw the amendment dockets for each and read off the most recent date of amendment, attested by seal. The clause bearing the later date prevails in its entirety — not merely in the passage disputed — a consequence of the Board's ruling in the matter of the Rehoboth Imbroglio of 768, which held that "a clause amended is a clause remade" (Third Concordance, Annex 9). Clauses amended on the same day are treated as simultaneously amended, and the Test is held to have failed; the matter passes automatically to the Test of Elevation.

Ordinary applications are heard within nine days. Applications concerning clauses of the Seventh Concordance, or any annex of it, are heard out of sequence, a courtesy dating from the long dispute over the Tripartite Test of Inherency, which is itself codified in that annex and was for some years the most frequently amended document in the Tower.

The Rehoboth grievance

The Test's reputation for reliability owes less to its logic than to the patience of a single clerk. In the winter of 811, a docket-clerk named Rehoboth of the Eleventh Scriptorium lodged a protest, still preserved in the Court of Silenced Appeals, alleging that the Test of Recency had been applied to a clause whose amendment date had been entered by Rehoboth himself, on the instruction of a Librarian who did not sign the docket. Rehoboth argued that an unsigned amendment had no date, and that a clause without a date could not be tested for recency. The Board heard the protest in three sittings and replied that the amendment bore the seal of the Librarian, and that the seal, not the signature, attests the date. The protest was dismissed. Rehoboth returned to the Eleventh Scriptorium and, by his own later account, amended nothing for eleven years.

"The date is not a property of the hand that writes it, nor of the ink that carries it, but of the seal that closes it; and the seal, once set, is closed to question."

— Board of Concordant Interpretation, ruling of 4 Frost, 811

The ruling is cited to this day whenever a party to a dispute seeks to challenge not the clause but its dating. It has made the Test of Recency extremely difficult to contest and, by the same stroke, extremely difficult to appeal.

The dispute with the doctrine of Temporal Ballast

The Test of Recency is contested by an older doctrine of Temporal Ballast, which holds that a provision's authority increases with its antiquity: the longer a clause has stood unamended, the more weight it should carry, on the reasoning that a clause which has survived revision has proved itself. This doctrine has never been formally repealed. It survives in scattered prefaces to the Second Concordance and in the preamble to Clause 3, and its adherents — chiefly among the keepers of the deep floors, who spend their working lives among very old and wholly unamended documents — continue to argue that the Test of Recency rewards restlessness over wisdom. The Edict of the Sealed Spiral of 903 was issued to settle the matter by asserting procedural recency over antiquity for purposes of chronological accuracy, and is generally read as having done no such thing, since it addressed itself to accuracy and not to authority.

The practical consequence is well illustrated by the long conflict between Clause 7 and Clause 7 of the Third Concordance, which govern the same subject in incompatible terms. Clause 7 of the Third Concordance was amended most recently and therefore prevails under the Test of Recency. It has, however, not been applied on any floor above the Hundred and Fortieth since 887, because the clerks who would apply it regard the older Clause 7 as the truer statement of the rule. No Concordance requires them to apply the clause they have found to prevail.

Limits and failure conditions

The Test presumes that amendment dates are distinguishable and honestly recorded. Neither presumption is secure. Dates on the lower floors are frequently recorded to the season and not to the day; on the floors between the Two Hundred and Twentieth and the Two Hundred and Thirty-Sixth, by order of the Department of Matriculation, dates are recorded by the height of the water in the stairwell cisterns, and two amendments in a dry winter may be indistinguishable. Where the Test of Recency cannot distinguish dates, the Test of Elevation is applied, giving precedence to the clause drawn from the highest-numbered Concordance. Where the Test of Elevation also fails, the matter enters the Tripartite Test of Inherency, which by design isolates the search teams so that no single interpretation may be corroborated by another, and the isolation is not lifted until the Corroborative Review is complete.

Where none of these resolves the conflict, the Test of Continuity passes authority to whichever interpretation best preserves the functional continuity of the floor or office concerned. The Test of Recency has thus never been the last word, only the first; but it has been the first word on every disputed clause in the Tower for upward of two centuries.

Record-keeping

Applications and outcomes are entered in the Recency Register, held in the Board's antechamber and bound in seventeen volumes to date. The Register may be consulted by any Librarian and by any applicant with a live dispute. Applicants are asked not to handle the seals.