The Collection of Tactically Unsound Heraldry

The Collection of Tactically Unsound Heraldry (Regalia of Asserted Monarchies, sub-series R.A.M. 9.71.t.u.) is a closed-access holding of some eleven hundred armorial devices, marshalled bearings, and asserted blazons judged, on review, to be of no use in a confrontation of any kind. It is maintained on Floor 712 adjoining the Heraldry Mezzanine, four bays north of the Dual-Chambered Reliquary of Implied Sovereignty, and is administered jointly by the Heraldry Mezzanine and the Dialectical Containment Bureau. Materials are admitted to the Collection only on the finding of a Tactical Review Panel; no device has ever been released from it.

Origin

The Collection was constituted under the Eleventh Concordance, Annex 6, following the Hernedine Affair of Cycle 137 — an attempt by a minor pretender to prosecute a territorial claim by parading an escutcheon so heavily counterchanged that no two witnesses could describe it alike to the reviewing officers. The claim was dismissed, but the escutcheon itself was retained, since it was by then the only object in the matter capable of being entered in a ledger. The Annex provided that:

"A bearing whose show of force cannot be sustained before three witnesses of ordinary sight shall be held, and not displayed, and shall be counted among the instruments that do not act."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex 6, clause 2

The wording of "instruments that do not act" was borrowed, without acknowledgement, from an earlier schedule of the Archive of Rejected Palettes, and the two collections have quarrelled over the borrowing at intervals ever since.

The Review Panels and their findings

A Tactical Review Panel sits in threes and returns one of four findings: Bearing Sound, Bearing Held, Bearing Superseded, or Tactically Unsound. Only the last conveys admission. The panels take the view, laid out in the Sexton Memorandum of Cycle 141, that a device is tactically sound if a reasonable holder of it could be expected to act under it; the test is not whether the arms are correct, which is a matter for the mezzanine, but whether anyone would do anything.

In practice the panels have found almost nothing sound. Chief among the grounds for finding against a bearing is indistinguishability at the distance of parley, a standard of forty paces adopted in Cycle 143 after the Panel spent an afternoon unable to tell the Cohort of the Ninth Meridian from the Salt Reversion at any greater distance. Also common are shrinking upon unfurling, inversion under moderate rain, and — the largest single category, some two hundred and forty devices — charge obscured by tincture. The Collection's second-largest group consists of bearings whose ordinaries are correct in law but point in no direction, a class the Panel designates heraldically erect, tactically astray.

The Freid Annex

The Collection's sequestration register was kept by Sub-Librarian Edvar Freid from Cycle 148 to 153, during which period he admitted nothing. Freid held, against the Panel, that the soundness of a bearing could not be assessed before use, and that the Panel's forty-pace standard presumed a field of engagement the Tower had no mandate to establish. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, supports him to the extent of requiring that any finding of Tactical Unsoundness be tested against a re-enactment; the Seventh Concordance holds, in a clause concerning unsound premises, that no such re-enactment is required where the finding is manifest. Nothing in the Seventh purports to overrule the Fourth, and the Panel has proceeded as though it does.

Freid's register was found after his reassignment to contain one entry: Admitted: none. Returned: none. A note appended below the entry, in a different ink, records that he had refused to admit a bearing on the ground that the Panel's copy of the Sexton Memorandum was the third recension and he did not recognise it. He is understood to have spent the remainder of his tenure cataloguing door furniture.

Relation to other collections

The Collection has twice been proposed as a source for the Paradoxon Collection, on the argument that a bearing that will not act is anomalous enough to qualify. Both proposals were refused on the same ground: that a device failing to act is not a paradox but a disappointment, and the Paradoxon Collection does not take disappointments. The Collection of Unallocated Doors has supplied mounts and counter-mounts to the Collection since Cycle 152, though the mounts are filed separately in Provincial Collection Gamma-7 and require dual authorisation from the Holdback Collection to be consulted alongside the bearings they carry.

A standing dispute with The Schism Collection concerns the Collection's holdings of mistaken marshalling — arms borne by the wrong side of a house, which the Panel classifies as tactically unsound, and which the Schism Collection claims as its own under Division IV. The matter has been referred to the Concordance of Precedence three times without resolution.

Access

The Collection is not lent, and a reader may consult it only in the presence of a Heraldry Mezzanine officer. Inquiries should be directed to the bay, not to the floor. Reading-room rules for the adjoining mezzanine forbid umbrellas, wet cloaks, and the carrying of arms in the open position; the last is enforced literally and has caused friction with visitors from the Restricted Manuscripts Collection, whose readers arrive by the north stair.

One device in the Collection — the sixth of the Freid intake, a chevron between three extinguishers — has been found on review to be sound. It has not been removed, since removal would require the Original Finding, the Original Finding was mislaid in Cycle 156, and the Panel has declined to make a second one on the ground that it never makes a second one.