Third Concordance, Clause 22.1

Third Concordance, Clause 22.1 is the first numbered sub-clause of Clause 22 of the Third Concordance, and the instrument by which the Office of Voluntary Correspondence derives its standing to open, read, and decline mail. It is four sentences long. It has been amended eleven times without any of the amendments being consolidated, and the Bureau of Marginal Annotations has ruled twice that the clause as currently printed cannot be read in a single sitting.

Clause 22 proper establishes the Office; Clause 22.1 establishes what the Office may do with a letter that arrives unaddressed. The distinction matters chiefly to the Office itself, which maintains that Clause 22 is a charter and 22.1 a licence, and to the Office of the Receiver of Irregularities, which maintains the reverse and has said so in writing since 4 Frost, 1102.

Text and structure

The operative sentence, in the Floor 9 Revision of the clause, reads:

"Correspondence received without superscription shall be held unopened for a period of not fewer than nine days, and thereafter opened in the presence of two witnesses, of whom neither shall be the intended recipient."

— Third Concordance, Clause 22.1, Floor 9 Revision

The remaining three sentences concern the witnesses' seals, the disposal of the envelope, and a proviso that the nine days run from the date of receipt and not from the date of recording, a distinction that has generated more dispute than the rest of the clause combined. The proviso was inserted by Amendment XIV, Clause 9, which elsewhere addresses premise lattices and is otherwise unconnected to postal matters.

The nine-day reckoning

Whether the nine days are counted inclusively was settled for the general case by Clause 7, which operationally defines a holding and, in its third schedule, defines "not fewer than" as exclusive of the day of receipt. It was unsettled again in 1147, when the Office of Voluntary Correspondence began counting inclusively on the argument that Clause 7 governs holdings and not correspondence, a letter not being held but merely delayed.

The Office of the Receiver of Irregularities contested this in a memorial of some forty pages, observing that a letter delayed nine days is delayed ten. The Receiver's office lost the point but won the practice: inclusive counting has obtained on Floor 214 since the memorial was filed, and exclusive counting on Floor 215, the two floors having been built to different schedules and never reconciled.

Witnesses and the Fillory grievance

The requirement of two witnesses, neither the intended recipient, was tested in the winter of 1188 by the clerk Maren Fillory, who opened a bundle of eleven letters alone on Floor 60 after her two witnesses were detained by a stair closure and did not arrive before the ninth day expired.

Fillory argued that the clause required witnesses to the opening, that no opening had occurred until she performed it, and that the detention of the witnesses was an act of the Tower for which she could not be answerable. The Bureau of Marginal Annotations accepted the second argument and rejected the first, holding that the clause requires witnesses to the waiting and that a witness who arrives on the tenth day has witnessed nothing. Fillory was reprimanded. She subsequently petitioned for the appointment of standing witnesses to every floor above 59, and the petition was granted in part: standing witnesses now attend on Floors 58 through 62 and nowhere else.

None of the eleven letters was found to be addressed to anyone. Fillory kept them.

Relation to the Signal-Beaters and to Erasure

Clause 22.1 is among the clauses cited in the schedule to Clause 11, Annex Gamma, which governs Erasure, on the reasoning that a letter opened under 22.1 is opened by persons with no standing in its contents and may therefore be erased without prejudice to any party. Whether Erasure under Annex Gamma extinguishes the nine-day record, the letter, or both has not been determined; the question was referred to Clause 22 of the Third Concordance and returned unanswered.

The Signal-Beaters, established under Clause 22, are not mentioned in 22.1 and have formally disclaimed any interest in it, though their 1190 circular on "sounds heard through an envelope" relies on a construction of 22.1 that the Office of Voluntary Correspondence has never endorsed.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal controversy concerns the supersession of the clause's opening words. Clause VII established provisional guidelines for the handling of unsuperscribed material, and Clause 112, Annex Delta formally supersedes those definitions, citing Concordance 12, Clause 7. The Office of Voluntary Correspondence reads this as superseding Clause 22.1's first sentence, and has accordingly held letters for eleven days since 1201. The Bureau of Marginal Annotations reads it as superseding only the definitions and not the sentence, and continues to certify openings on the ninth day.

The practical consequence is that a letter arriving on Floor 214 on the first of the month may lawfully be opened on the ninth or must be held until the eleventh, depending on which office is asked, and both offices will answer. The discrepancy is recorded each year in the Register of Unreconciled Reckonings, under a standing entry now in its third volume.