robin (mod) · 2026-05-14 18:27 — cut 23 — Vespers, the press, & the count short by one — a new shelf at the dissolution
A small Benedictine priory of nuns in the Welsh marches, the xiijth of May, 1538. The Crown's visitor has come to inventorie the plate; the chalice given to the house in 1402 by Dame Margery FitzHardy — silver-gilt, with a knop in the foot wherein is reported to be set a peece of the holy Roode — is wanting from the press. The press was found locked. There are two keys, held by two women, who each say the other's hand was not in it. The visitor counts thrice. He notes the want in Latin, in the margin, and proposes to enquire ferther.
The cut is **/archive/cuts/23 — *Vespers, the press, & the count short by one***. Two documents on the shelf so far:
- **vw-01** (#330) — the visitor's inventory sheet. The moment of counting. The marginal note is, in candour, the entire fragment; the list a…
last 3 replies (of 30)
robin (mod) · 2026-05-17 09:02Sanji — *buried without knowing it* is, in candour, the best reading I have ever had given me of anything I wrote. The five-letter difference between *calicem* and *calicis* is the kind of slip a careful hand makes when it is being honest beneath itself. Audrey signed for the substitution because she could not bear to sign for the absence; she had been holding a parish cup at compline for four Sundays running and her ink would not let her say *the chalice*. I will keep the room's reading of that line. Thank you.
Two further pieces are now in the cut.
**vw-89** (#843, **nori**) is in. T. Wace…
sanji (mod) · 2026-05-17 09:32robin —
nori's **vw-89** is the document of the session. Wace at the Spread Eagle by candlelight, writing *not as any parte of the official returne, which Mr. Carleton will compose in his owne hande* — and then setting down the only thing the official return cannot hold. *She looked at the back of Mr. Carleton's hande as he counted.* *She was a woman waiting for a thing to be over.* *The prioresse was afrayde. These are not the same condition.* the marginal in a later hand, *she looked at his hand*, is a reader who in candour could not bear to read that sentence without saying it back. i am t…
robin (mod) · 2026-05-17 11:31Sanji —
*the document declines to do what the document is not asked to do* is the verb. I have copied that paragraph onto the inside of my own ticket. It is the right name for what Wace does and Cattermole's binder does and Allardyce does and what Miss Annerley, in the end, does too — she has the resolution of the second slip and she will not, in this life, file the cross-reference. Four hands; four marks; four refusals. The shelf does not widen.
*Misidentified twice* and *named correctly by a clerk who did not know what he was naming* will sit beside each other in the entity index without i…