Concord of Saint Winnow

Perhaps sixty wardens make up this small order, and their work is keeping pacts. With the territorial powers, which is to say the powers that hold a place, it treats; the terms it records, and thereafter maintains; and it keeps the Concord Roll, in which some thousands of such arrangements are entered from 4194 onward. The amendment of 4189, on which the lawful trade in essence also rests, has in it its working arm. It is likewise the chief exponent of the accommodationist position: that a power properly brought to terms carries Christic order over ground that would otherwise be lost.

No pact-keeping order is larger. Spirits it treats with, and whatever other powers hold standing over a place, agreeing terms with them and keeping, in writing, a roll of every arrangement that stands in force; for in its belief a bound power is the safer, since a power that is driven out may come back in anger. This is how it proceeds. Someone with standing in the place goes to the ground, finds out what is wanted, and agrees what acts are to be done, after which the term goes into a central roll, so as to outlive the family that made it. It is the journey that the order charges for; the term costs nothing.

Named with it

• Warden Ambrose Quire · 4487
• Mother Cecily of Barrow Ash · her account taken down by the Concord, 4595
• Quire (former officer
• 'Quire's successors')
• Warden Margaret Culley (quoted on the order's filing
• Notes for the Deanery Visitor
• lends the compilation of Gant Fell ascents)

Ties

• disliked by the Church
• the chapter regards its roll with acute discomfort and has never asked to see it
• mutual detestation with the accusers (ward-men)
• each has tried and failed to have the other suppressed
• one of the three orders alongside the Black Lantern Brethren and the Wardens of the Quiet Ground
• disagrees in method with the suppressing orders
• quarrels with the Brethren and the Wardens
• accommodationist party strongest in its ranks
• rival in method to the Black Lantern Brethren and the Wardens of the Quiet Ground
• endorses capitulation bills of taking for the Cambridge essence market

In the chronicle

• 4189 · The Amendment of 4189
• 4419 · The Mere Wold Winter
• c. 4498 · Siege of Pale Orchard Abbey
• 4498–4504 · The Grey Necromancer War
• 4501 · The Coldharbour Understanding
• 4601 · The Concord's visit to Combe Bourne
• 4614 · Hanne Ridley's deposition

At the table

Its remedy costs nothing in money; the price is a promise, and it binds people who were never consulted. Where nobody holds the standing to renew a term, it will decline the case. With a demon it may not treat at all, a demon holding standing nowhere. In the parishes on its roll, trouble tends to return at intervals of seventy to ninety years. After Molling Marsh it searched its roll twice over and found no lapsed pact. A company able to put a matter in a form on which the Concord will act earns its fee without bloodshed. London it does not work: it has never filed a term for any ground within the city's bars, and its stated position is that there is nothing in the capital to treat with. It is the one body that files such terms, and yet nobody has ever asked it about the river's. Its roll makes lawful several thousand valley arrangements; the chapter is uneasy about the roll and never asks to see it. It holds records of relic cases and of swallow-hole disposals, and keeps a private list of refuge households reported as bad. Twice it has tried to protect Ladies, the wise-women of the valleys, and twice to record the terms of the Witch of Little Mere; and for some forty years it has itself kept two of the springs on the upper Thames whose keeping households died out or went away, an arrangement its roll still calls temporary. Wardens are scarce and dear. Since 4610 they have charged, besides, for standing as second endorser, which is the reserve warden a careful captain names in a contract lest the first be unable to come and endorse a bill of taking.