The Chamber drafted the Charter of Hands at the long table in the Great Hall, with the shutters closed against the evening damp and two candles lit at each end, and Tallow read the Petition’s four clauses aloud before anybody was allowed to write a word of their own.
He read them slowly. He read them as a physician reads out the list of a patient’s symptoms to a room full of relatives who have been told the patient is well. The first clause was about names. The second was about the seats, and the silver bonds that would be paid on them, and the bank at Lessary where the silver would be held. The third was about the single count, which the Crown intended to remove. The fourth was about the Writ of Removal, drafted in advance, which would take the Hands out of the body one seat at a time, in the order the Crown’s clerk preferred.
When he had finished he laid the Chancery’s bond-form beside the Petition, and he laid his own minute beside both of them, and he sat back in his chair and let the Chamber look.
“Here,” said Tallow, and put his pen on the bond-form’s third clause. “The Crown’s form takes the body’s single seat out of the count. It does it in a single word, which is singly, and it does it in the grammar of a bank account. Each Hand is entered as a separate subject. The body is not…
