Tallow went down to the Sallow Ford at dusk with the copy of the Survey Charter buttoned inside his coat, because the Chamber would need it at the morning sitting, and because the Charter was the only paper in the Hold that said in plain words what the Hold was.
He had made the copy himself, two nights before, in the Gatehouse, by the light of the Ink-lamp, and he had made it very carefully. The Survey Charter was not a long document. It defined the Hold’s March as the walked ground within three leagues of the Keystone. It named the Hold’s marks and its roads. It gave the Survey its rod and its right to measure, and it said, in the fourth clause, which Tallow had always thought the most beautiful sentence in the Hold’s law, that a line is only a line when it has been walked. He had written the fourth clause out twice, once in the Ink and once in the Chamber’s plain hand, and had checked each against the other, letter by letter, before he would let the copy leave the Gatehouse.
He had checked the copy twice more on the road, because a paper that has been carried two leagues across a marsh has been tested by the marsh, and a clerk who does not check it has only himself to blame. Its corners were damp. Its seal was whole. It was the Hold’s, and it was honest, and it had no Crown anywhere…
