Memory Levy

#On the Supplementary Entry

"The Litany is free. The memory is not." — note on a Tithes assessment stamp, Aachen

An Aachen merchant's assessment folio looks like any other in the western provinces. The ordinary duties come first, in the ordinary hand, owed for the ordinary reasons: goods moved, stores kept, a counting-house standing on ground the Church permits it to occupy. Beside them sits a second entry. The Bureau of Tithes records it as a supplementary assessment for the maintenance of institutional memory. Aachen calls it the memory levy. The Codex files it under doctrine, which is where it belongs, because nothing in it pays for a road, a granary or a garrison loaf.

The record names merchants. It names nobody else. The sources that describe the levy place it at Aachen, and at Aachen only, although Cologne, Liège and Maastricht share its roads and sell to the same commissaries. A reader who has heard the levy described as a Lowlands burden has been listening to a pamphleteer.

This survey, commissioned for the present year, prints no figure for the entry. Tithes keeps its sums, and Doctrine is concerned with the line. A sum tells you what a merchant paid. The line tells you what the city is.

#On the Settlement After the Gate

In A.S. 25 (1735 CE), Lord-Protector Guillaume surrendered Aachen to the Rationalists. The western gate opened at midnight on the Feast of Saint Bartholomew, and Colonel Verdane brought his columns in over a threshold that nobody had yet thought to carve. The price, as the Lore Book records it, was dominion over the Lowlands. That was a promise. Nobody has ever produced the deed. The Betrayal broke the northern faithful front within a week, and the chronicle runs on from there through Regensburg in A.S. 30 and the Sundering on 1 November A.S. 45. The levy has no part in any of it.

The levy belongs to what came after the Concordat of Strasbourg in A.S. 90 (1800 CE). The published accounts attach it to the post-Concordat restoration of Aachen, and they do not give the year of the first entry. I do not supply one. A first year would invite an anniversary, and an anniversary invites the idea that the thing has an age and might one day grow old enough to die.

What the settlement required is clear enough. Aachen was a road-knot between Cologne, Liège, Maastricht and the Lowlands, and a burnt junction carries no wagons. So the Synod kept the city whole. It garrisoned Aachen with regiments drawn from provinces that had not fallen to treachery, reconsecrated its churches with brine and ash, and sent the council a bill. Its merchants received their supplementary assessments. Most of them had been born after the midnight in question. The assessment was never concerned with what they had done. It was concerned with where they kept their shops.

#On the Assessment

Three facts about the levy are attested, and I set them down in the Bureau's own order. Tithes collects it. It is entered on merchants' assessments beside their ordinary duties. Its duration is permanent pending moral improvement.

The first fact surprises nobody. Tithes collects most things that can be weighed, and the Bureau has long taught that payment is a form of devotion and the purse a fair instrument for disciplining the soul. The second fact is the clever one. Placing the memory beside the ordinary duties means it is assessed by the same assessor, at the same table and with the same seal as the toll on wool and the due on stores. Aachen's shame does not come to its merchants as an extraordinary visitation. It arrives with the routine paperwork, and in the Church nothing lasts longer than routine paperwork.

The third fact is the doctrine.

An ordinary duty, once paid, is discharged. The merchant receives his sealed receipt, the assessor balances his ledger, and the matter is closed until the next assessment finds new goods to weigh. The memory levy produces a receipt as well. The receipt proves that the merchant paid. It does not prove that Aachen has repented, because repentance is not a thing Tithes issues receipts for. A merchant may pay in full, on time and under witness for his whole working life, and the city's account will be exactly where his father left it. Payment satisfies the assessor. It cannot satisfy the condition.

The Bureau has not published what moral improvement would look like, how it would be measured or who would measure it. I have not asked. A question of that kind, put in writing to Tithes, comes back as an assessment.

#On the Three Expressions of Penance

The Gate Litany is the city's other ledger, and it is kept in voices. Aachen's children learn it before multiplication. New soldiers of the garrison kneel at the threshold cross on their first morning and recite its forty-seven clauses, from I did not open it to hold me accountable anyway. Pilgrims cross the mark barefoot. The merchants pay the levy.

Visitors who read too many devotional pamphlets run these together. They are separate obligations with separate scopes. The child recites and is not assessed. The soldier kneels once, on arrival, and is generally a stranger to Aachen, posted there from a province that kept faith. The pilgrim gives the stone his soles and goes home. Of the four, the merchant's payment is the only one Tithes collects, and the Litany itself, the assessment stamp is careful to say, is doctrinal and not taxable.

What joins them is a single teaching. Every one of these people can say the first clause truthfully, and the Church does not regard that as an answer. The Bureau of Doctrine has never held that the merchant opened the gate, or the child, or the recruit from the eastern provinces. It holds that the city opened it. The merchant trades in that city, eats its bread and profits from its roads, and he is assessed as its citizen. The soldier states his innocence aloud and accepts accountability in the same breath. The merchant does both on paper.

#On the Gold Melted Later

In A.S. 160 (1870 CE), during the Panic of Wrath's March, the Bureau of Tithes ordered Aachen's golden reliquaries melted into coin. Local petitioners protested. The Bureau answered with scales. The coins were called gate-pennies by the soldiers at Bastion-Przemyśl and refused by the widows of Cologne. They circulated for eleven years, mostly through forward commissaries.

This was a separate act, by the same Bureau, on the same city, some generations after the levy was already being entered. The melting does not date the levy, and it did not pay it off. The memory entry went on appearing in the merchants' folios after A.S. 160 just as it had before. Aachen gave up its saints' gold and still owed its memory, which tells you which of the two the Bureau valued more.

#On the Continuing Application

Aachen in A.S. 201 (1911 CE) is clean, prosperous, devout, watched and unreconciled. Its workshops turn out hinge-plates, lock-bolts, courier buckles and penitent souvenirs. Its garrison polishes the threshold until the groove shines black. Its merchants pay the memory levy with public solemnity and private expertise in evasion. This survey does not catalogue the expertise. The Bureau of Tithes has its own catalogue, and I suspect it is longer than mine would be.

The city has asked Strasbourg six times since A.S. 134 to lift its penitential classification. The petitions came with church attendance, tithe compliance, garrison discipline and pilgrimage receipts, and each was denied in one sentence: Aachen remains Aachen. None of them was a request for relief from the levy, and none needed to be. While the classification holds, the condition attached to the levy cannot be met, and the line beside the ordinary duties will be ruled in again at the next assessment, in the same hand.

Every evening the western gate is barred at curfew, with three clerks to witness it, two soldiers to hold the hinge lamps and one bell. The counting-houses close at about the same hour. Their folios go into the drawers with both entries balanced and one account still open.