The Anselm Amendment

The Anselm Amendment is the informal designation given to the rider appended to Amendment 47 in the winter of 3,388, by which the survey boundaries of Floor 704 were redrawn without recourse to the ordinary territorial register. It is not a Concordance and was never entered in the register as an amendment proper; the name is a convenience adopted by the Office of Bounds and Recensions in 3,392 and retained, despite repeated objection, in every catalogue since. Its drafting is attributed — on evidence that remains contested — to Librarian-Scribe Anselm the Circumspect, whose later Mending Protocols are generally read as an attempt to repair the inconsistencies the rider introduced.

Origin and occasion

The winter of 3,388 was a hard one on Floor 704. The east gallery had lost nine bays to settlement, and the survey parties could no longer agree on where the floor's boundary with Floor 703 lay. Rather than reopen the full territorial schedule, the Convening Bench at that time directed that a provisional survey be attached to the existing amendment, on the understanding that it would be regularised within the year. It was not regularised within the year. It has not been regularised since.

The rider's operative clause is brief, and is quoted here in the recension held by the Third Catalogue:

"The eastern limit of the floor shall be taken as the line established by the survey of the eleventh of Frost, and shall hold notwithstanding any earlier entry, until such time as a full schedule is laid."

— Amendment 47, rider of 3,388, clause 2

The difficulty is the phrase "until such time." No instrument in the Tower specifies who may lay a full schedule, and none has been laid. The rider has therefore governed the eastern limit of Floor 704 for the better part of a century, on what all parties agree is a provisional footing.

The attribution dispute

That the rider bears the hand of a junior scribe is not in question; that the junior scribe was Librarian-Scribe Anselm the Circumspect is. The School of the Unnamed Scribe has argued since 3,401 that the initials on the rider are too few to support attribution, and that the work belongs instead to an unrecorded hand of the same scriptorium — a position the School has maintained in the same words at every subsequent hearing. Against this, the Office of Bounds and Recensions observes that the rider's orthography matches Circumspect's Clause 31 drafting so closely that coincidence is implausible.

Much of the confusion arises from the crowded field of Ansellian names in the period. Librarian-Proctor Anselm, who had lately been granted authority over all matters pertaining to illumination and who had promulgated The First Edict of Lamps, is frequently named in the marginalia of the same bundle. A marginal note reading merely "Anselm, on the eastern question" has been adduced by both sides, and settles nothing. Anselm Tarrow of the Fourth Convening Bench is occasionally drawn into the dispute by those who have not read the signatures.

Application on Floor 704

Under the rider, the eastern limit of Floor 704 follows a line that cuts through three reading rooms and the north wall of the bindery. The bindery wall is not a boundary in any other instrument, and the binders have objected continuously since 3,391, on the practical ground that the east end of their workbench is now administered as part of Floor 703 and must be requested in writing before use. The Office of Bounds has twice issued a clarification confirming this arrangement; the second clarification is the shorter of the two.

Contradiction with the Fifth Concordance

The chief obstacle to regularising the rider is the territorial restriction amendment appended to the Fifth Concordance, which forbids the alteration of any floor boundary by rider, schedule, or annex without the seal of the Convening Bench. The Anselm Amendment is a rider altering a floor boundary. The Bench has never sealed it. Both instruments remain in force.

The standard resolution, repeated in three separate opinions of the Office of Bounds, is that the Fifth Concordance amendment governs boundaries made after its own promulgation, while the Anselm Amendment is not "made" but "taken as established" — a distinction that has satisfied no one and has never been overturned. A minority reading holds that the rider is void and the bindery has been administered in error since 3,391, an outcome the binders have declined to petition for.

Later history and the pending schedule

The rider was carried into the recension of Amendment 47 prepared under Librarian-Prime Anselm the Damp, whose control of the Third Catalogue has shaped every subsequent copy; the Damp recension prints the rider in smaller type and with a note that it is "of uncertain standing." A parallel entry appears in Amendment Annex Sigma.7, which cites the Anselm Amendment as an instance of a provisional instrument surviving its occasion. The Petition for an Eighth Concordance names it among the instruments that "cannot be amended because they were never properly made."

A full schedule for the eastern limit of Floor 704 has been in preparation since 3,412. It is presently with the Office of Bounds and Recensions, unsealed. A note on the file, dated 3,417 and signed only with initials, records that the schedule may not be laid while the survey of the eleventh of Frost remains in force, and that the survey may not be lifted while the schedule is unlaid. Requests to consult the east end of the bindery workbench should be directed to Floor 703.