#On the Attested Provision
"…all surplus organic material generated by Synod subjects." — Concordat Supplementary, Canon 17-D, as cited
This entry surveys one canon, as it stands in A.S. 201, and the use the Bureau of Tithes presently makes of it. The instrument is called the Concordat Supplementary. The canon is 17-D. Its attested wording addresses "all surplus organic material generated by Synod subjects." Those seven words, and the fiscal citation that carries them into the parishes, are all the record I may set down as fact.
Everything else is silence, and I will list the silence once so that no clerk mistakes it for modesty. The date on which the Supplementary was enacted or ratified has not been established. Neither has the date on which Canon 17-D entered it. The survey has no promulgator to name, no neighbouring canons to quote and no full text to reproduce. It has no account of how the instrument has been kept or amended. No document before me says whether it supplements the Concordat of Strasbourg of A.S. 90, the Concordat Charter of A.S. 92, or something else. The Charter codified the Bureau's general fiscal mandate. That was the Charter's business, and it does not date this canon. I will not give the Charter that job merely because it sits nearby.
#On Surplus Organic Material
"The canon says surplus. It does not say surplus to what. I consider this its finest quality." — Archbishop of Tithes Salome Veyrault (attributed)
That epigraph is attributed, and I give it no greater standing. The canon's own words deserve the closer reading, because they are all that survives in the record, and every word of them works for the Bureau.
All. Within the attested fragment, the word admits no exemption. Whether the full canon contains exemptions I cannot say, because the full canon is not before me. Within the seven words that are, "all" means all.
Surplus. Nothing I hold defines it. A surplus requires a measure, and a measure requires someone to hold the scale. The canon leaves that to whoever is holding it on the day. In practice that is a Tithe Assessor, who arrives with a calibrated iron scale and a gilded ledger and is seldom persuaded that anything a household owns is necessary to it.
Organic material. This is the broadest phrase in the canon, and I decline to list what else it might be made to cover. In a Doctrine survey, a list of possibilities becomes a schedule of collection by the following week, and I am not going to write the Bureau of Tithes a schedule for free.
Generated. The verb treats the subject as a workshop and whatever the subject produces as output. Output can be measured, and anything that can be measured can be owed. I recognise the habit of mind. I recognise it rather too well, for reasons the reader will reach shortly.
Synod subjects. That means everyone. The Bureau of Tithes already claims universal jurisdiction over the baptised. Canon 17-D, as Archbishop Veyrault reads it, extends that claim from what a subject owns to what a subject's body makes.
The breadth is the point of the citation. A narrow canon would need lawyers to stretch it, and lawyers bill Tithes at the same rates Tithes bills everyone else. A broad canon needs only someone to read it aloud.
#On the First Teeth and Their Assessment
"Preemptive dues." — Bureau of Tithes, classification of the confiscations
The Bureau's Assessors have been known to confiscate infants' first teeth as "preemptive dues." The Synod's own descriptive literature records the practice without attaching any canon to it. The canon came later in the paperwork, when somebody asked for it.
I asked. As a Hieromnemon of the Bureau of Doctrine, I queried the doctrinal basis for the confiscations, which is the sort of question my office exists to ask and the Bureau of Tithes exists to answer briskly. Archbishop Salome Veyrault answered from the Palatine Counting House in Strasbourg. She cited Canon 17-D of the Concordat Supplementary and its reach over "all surplus organic material generated by Synod subjects."
The connection between the tooth and the canon is the Archbishop's reasoning. The canon, in the words available to me, does not mention teeth. Her citation rests on the claim that a first tooth is organic, that a subject generated it, and that it is surplus. On the record she was not asked to prove the third claim, and I did not ask her to.
Several questions remain unanswered. The record does not say at what age an infant becomes liable, how often the confiscations occur, or how many teeth go into a ledger in a season. It does not say how the teeth come into an Assessor's possession. "Confiscate" describes the Bureau taking a thing. It does not describe how that thing became available to be taken, and I will not supply a method the documents do not contain.
Preemptive troubles me more than dues. A preemptive due is collected before something else happens. The classification does not say what that something is. A theologian notices when a word has been placed to keep a question from being asked. A Doctrine man notices it twice, the second time with professional envy.
#On the Author's Recollection
"I checked."
I checked. The Canon exists. I wrote it. I had forgotten.
I set those four sentences down plainly because I cannot decorate them. I have served the Synod for thirty-one years. In that time I have drafted doctrines, glosses, corrections, confirmations and enough canons that, before this survey, I would have said I could recite every one. I could not recite this one. I recognised the phrasing before I recognised what it had been used for, and I am told this is the usual order for authors.
My claim is limited, and I want it read as limited. I wrote Canon 17-D. I make no claim on the record that I wrote the Concordat Supplementary as a whole, or that I promulgated it. I do not claim that I designed the confiscations the canon is now cited to justify. The Bureau of Tithes found the canon without my help. It found the infants without my help as well.
Nothing in the survey records when I wrote the canon, or why, or whether anyone revised it after I put it down. I have searched my memory for the occasion, and my memory is less tidy than my archive. The words are mine. I acknowledge them as mine. I would have preferred to acknowledge them before the Archbishop did.
#On the Separate Instruments and the Present Citation
"Future burden, present duty." — Bureau of Tithes slogan, A.S. 157, belonging to another instrument entirely
The Cradle Decree must be kept apart from this canon, and someone in every generation of clerks tries to merge them. The Decree was promulgated in A.S. 157. It assesses dues on a child's projected ration consumption from the date a pregnancy is confirmed, and it works through the household assessment machinery set out in its own published account. It bills a mother for an appetite her child has not yet had.
Canon 17-D, as cited, concerns organic surplus that a subject has already generated. One instrument charges for what a child will consume. The other is invoked to take what a child has produced.
The resemblance is understandable. The Decree's published account also mentions infant-tooth trays in the weigh-chapels of the Counting House, along with the denials and objections that followed them. Shared imagery establishes nothing. No record before this survey says that Canon 17-D belongs to the Cradle Decree, that the Decree amended the Supplementary, or that the procedures of one can be lent to the other. Each instrument has its own text, its own date or lack of one, and its own clerks to answer for it.
The present position is narrower than any rumour about it. Archbishop Veyrault, for the Bureau of Tithes, cites Canon 17-D of the Concordat Supplementary as the basis for confiscating infants' first teeth as preemptive dues. The citation stands in A.S. 201. This survey records it and makes no ruling on it. The Bureau of Doctrine has not been asked for a ruling, and it has not issued one.
The canon's author has reread it. He finds the grammar sound.