Third Age of Refurbishment

The Third Age of Refurbishment is the formal designation given to the period of Tower history extending from the ratification of the Fifth Concordance in 401 to the closing registry entry of the Office of Sustaining Works on the fourteenth day of the eleventh month, 468. It is chiefly remembered for the reclassification of refurbishment from a maintenance activity to a species of historical documentation, and for the administrative career of Prefect Aris Thorn, who served throughout it as a clerk-provisional. The Age's protocols remain in force on 214 floors that have never filed for exemption, most of them stairwells.

Origin and dating

The Age did not begin with any act of refurbishment. It began with a drafting quarrel. The Fifth Concordance, Clause 8, defined a refurbished surface as "any surface whose current condition is traceable, in writing, to a prior condition now superseded" (Fifth Concordance, Clause 8). The Guild of Wall-Masons objected that this made every wall in the Tower refurbished, since every wall had at some point been repainted, replastered, or simply looked at differently. The Sublime Order of the T-Square countered that this was precisely the point, and the Librarians, declining to adjudicate, issued the period its name by administrative accident: the clerk who filed the ratification docket wrote "Third Age of Refurbishment" in the subject line where he should have written "Third Age of Refurbishment (provisional)", and by the time the error was noticed the term had appeared in eleven circulars.

Dating from the ratification is conventional but not universal. A minority position, maintained by the Academy of Procedural Antiquity, holds that the Age properly begins with the Third Recursive Inversion, on the grounds that no procedural period can predate the precedent it curates. The Academy's position has been noted and set aside in every recension since.

Refurbishment as record

Under the Age's protocols, a refurbishment was no longer a repair but an entry. A mason sent to correct a bulging wall on Spiral 9,806 was required first to establish the wall's superseded condition in writing, then to obtain the countersignature of the floor's registrar, then to perform the work, then to establish the wall's new condition as a superseded condition in its turn, since the next refurbishment would require it. The Manual of Tangible Verification became required reading in certain scriptoria for the first time during this period, largely because its chapter on "Surfaces That Resist Description" was the only text anyone could find that addressed the problem.

The burden fell hardest on clerks. Prefect Aris Thorn, then a clerk-provisional, is recorded as having processed 1,140 refurbishment declarations in the winter of 447 alone, of which 1,132 concerned the same forty metres of corridor on Spiral 12,004, repeatedly refinished by a maintenance crew who had not been informed that their work was now an archival act. Thorn's marginal note on the 447 ledger — "the corridor is not improving"— is preserved in the Annexes of the Third Concordance and is among the most frequently quoted lines of the Age.

The Beckford dispute

The Age's central scholarly disagreement concerns the status of works carried out without declaration. Registrar Halden Beckford of Spiral 6,113 maintained that undeclared refurbishment was void — that is, that a wall repaired without the required paperwork had not, in the Tower's sense, been repaired at all, and reverted to its prior condition upon inspection. The opposing view, advanced by the Binders' Consortium and eventually adopted, held that the wall was repaired regardless and the paperwork was the offence.

"A surface does not consult the registry before it dries."

— Binders' Consortium, Memorial to the Sixth Recension, §3

Beckford's doctrine was tested in 453 when a declared-then-repainted corridor on Spiral 6,113 was found to be in two conditions simultaneously, depending on which registrar was asked. The Third Concordant Court resolved the matter by declining jurisdiction, a disposition it has since used 61 times. Beckford's name survives principally as a verb, now archaic, meaning to restore something by argument.

Prefect Aris Thorn and the petition

Thorn's career is inseparable from the Age, and the Age is somewhat embarrassed by it. Late in the period he petitioned to be recognized as the administrative heir to Prefect Aris, an office whose existence the Third Librarianate has never confirmed. The petition was filed nineteen times over eleven years, each filing accompanied by a fresh recension of the argument and, on one occasion, by a diagram. The Librarians neither granted nor refused it; the Apocryphal Addenda to the Third Concordance record that the nineteenth filing was returned unopened with a note reading "not at this time," which the petitioner treated as encouragement. Third Spiral Administrative Circular 44-A was issued in part to clarify that "not at this time" carries no implication of a later time, and in part to state that it does not.

Close of the Age

The Age closed not by decree but by exhaustion. The Office of Sustaining Works ceased entering refurbishments in its registry on 14 November 468, and though no instrument formally concluded the period, the Thirty-Third Concordance refers to it throughout in the past tense, which the Third Concordant Court has held to be sufficient. Two floors, Spiral 3,301 and Spiral 3,302, have never accepted the closure and continue to file declarations under the Age's protocols; their filings are received, stamped, and shelved unread, a practice confirmed by Third Addendum and not since reviewed. Visitors to either floor are asked to sign the refurbishment register on arrival and again on departure.

The Age's surviving physical legacy is modest: 214 stairwells, the corridor on Spiral 12,004, and a quantity of sealing wax whose procurement office was itself refurbished twice during the period and cannot now be located.