The Moot's Charter, with a Rival's Commentary

The Highbridge Trade-Moot's licensing charter for foreign houses, reproduced clause by clause, with furious, funny, grudgingly admiring marginalia from an unnamed factor of the Stonewright Moot's Stonebench.

OF THE LICENSING OF FOREIGN HOUSES WITHIN THE WALLS OF HIGHBRIDGE, being the Instrument by which the Trade-Moot extends the courtesy of the city's law, and no more than its law, to such powers as petition for it. Clause One. Any power holding no seat within the walls of Highbridge may petition the Reeve's bench for a Charter, naming one house, in one place, to represent its people and its trade for the duration of the license. [i]The Trade-Moot flatters itself that a 'petition' is required, as though the Stonewright Moot has ever in its history petitioned for anything it could simply build. We have raised bridges over three rivers this city's own founders were still afraid to ford. We do not ask for a door. We knock it in the shape we require and hang it after.[/i] Clause Two. Upon grant, the licensed house shall be seated one voice upon the appropriate bench of the Reeve's court, to be heard on any matter touching its people, and shall be free to recruit, to trade, and to keep its own accounts within the walls under the protection of the Moot's law. [i]One voice. The Stonebench built the arches under half this city's Guildrows before the Reeve's grandmother's grandmother learned to walk on two legs, and we are offered one voice, equal to a road-clan elder's, equal to a galleries factor's, equal — I have checked — to the Wandering Cups' guild-master, who is licensed here for the crime of owning a good singing voice. I will grant the protection of the law is real. A Stonebench factor was robbed on the Kilns road last winter and the Reeve's court hanged the man inside a week, which is more than our own clan-courts manage in a season of arguing precedent. I note this only so the record is honest. It does not soften my opinion of the voice.[/i] Clause Three. The tithe owed by a licensed house shall be set by the trade volume passing through its door, assessed quarterly, and by no other measure — not by the reach of the chartering power, not by the rank of its envoy, not by the age of its claim. [i]Here is the clause that first made me put down my pen and walk the length of the Row twice before I trusted myself to write anything more than an oath. A galleries factor of the Stonewright Moot, master of a craft this city could not build its own bridges without, pays the same coin for the same square of counting-floor as a road-clan elder who arrived last season with a cart and an opinion. I called this an insult in my first draft of this page and struck it out, because on the third walk I could not find the flaw in it that I wanted to find. It is at least measured, and it is measured the same way for everyone, and it is checked — I checked it myself, against the charter-board, against three quarters of the Stonebench's own accounts — and it comes out honest every time. I dislike very much that a schedule this plain has out-argued me.[/i] Clause Four. All recruitment, all trade, and all disputes arising between a licensed house's people and any other party within the walls shall be settled under Moot law and before the Reeve's court, and under no other court, oath, or clan-reckoning, for so long as the parties remain within the walls. [i]This is the clause our own elders like least and use most. It means a Stonebench mason with a grievance against a galleries factor cannot simply invoke clan-law and settle it the honest way, with witnesses and a hammer. It also means the mason gets a hearing inside a week instead of waiting for the next clan moot to convene, which by the old reckoning could be a year and a season away. I have watched two disputes settled this way now. Both times the Moot's court found for the party I would have found for myself, which I record with some suspicion of my own reasoning rather than the court's.[/i] Clause Five. Every Charter shall be renewed, or lapse unrenewed, at the same session at which the benches settle the year's toll books, and at no other time, regardless of when in the year the original grant was made. [i]I laughed aloud at this the first time I read it — a Charter between two great powers, decided at the same sitting as the fishmongers' toll — and then I sat with the laugh a while and understood it. One session, one calendar, no factor able to demand a special sitting because his patron is impatient, no clerk run ragged chasing separate dates for forty different houses. It is the least dignified clause in the document and, I begin to suspect, the most competently written.[/i] Clause Six. A Charter may be closed before its term by a two-thirds closing of the toll books at any regular session — the same instrument, and the same majority, by which the benches may unseat a sitting High Reeve. [i]The same knife that cuts the Reeve's own throat, in other words, is the knife held to ours. I called this fair when I first read it, meaning it bitterly. I mean it less bitterly now. A city that can end its own ruler by the same vote that ends a foreign lease is not pretending its guests are beneath its own law. It is telling them, plainly, that they are inside it — which is a stranger and, I think now, a more honest courtesy than any keep this city could have offered us instead.[/i] Clause Seven. A Charter, upon lapse, revocation, or voluntary surrender, confers no continuing right, tenancy, or claim upon the ground, house, or custom it occupied. The licensed house's presence in the city ends with the paper that permitted it, wholly and without appeal. [i]This is the clause I came to the Row meaning to hate above all the others, and instead I find myself, to my own irritation, editing it. As written it says the tenancy ends with the paper — it does not say the tenancy was never anything but paper, which is a different claim and the one some lesser house's clever advocate will try to argue in twenty or fifty years, when the Stonebench's stones have sat on this ground so long that somebody forgets they were only ever borrowed. Amend it now, while the memory is fresh that the ground was always the city's own. I offer this without being asked, which is not a thing I expected to be writing when I sat down at this desk with every intention of composing a complaint.[/i] A note, appended, not filed, not submitted to any bench: I came to this document a rival of its whole premise — that a power such as ours should stand in a queue with road-clans and singing guilds and be measured by the same rule as any of them. I leave it, seven clauses later, unable to name the flaw I arrived certain I would find, and apparently now in the business of improving the thing I meant to dismantle. I do not care for what that says about me. I am recording it anyway, because a Wright's word is mortar, and mortar, once you have mixed it, does not much care what you originally intended to build with it.

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