The Chamber met at the candle-clock with the accusation lying on the long table, and Tallow read the Articles of the Hearth aloud from the beginning, which had not been done in full in the Great Hall since the day they were made. He had thought about it for most of the afternoon. A matter that touched the body’s own law ought to be heard from the law’s first word, he had decided, as a builder ought to see the first course of a wall before he is asked to judge the crack in the last.
He read them in the dry voice he kept for the minutes. He read the preamble, which had been sung rather than read the first time, by Mourner, who had made the Articles’ words into a tune that the Hands could remember when the paper was lost. He read the first article, which said that the Hold was the walked March and its Hands and its Dwellings, and that no body in it should be counted twice. He read the second, which defined a citizen as a person entered in the Register who kept a Dwelling in the Hold and remained by assent. Gaunt, at the bottom of the table, made a small noise at that, which Tallow took as an objection and recorded as one.
