Splints of Elm

1. Rotten old bits of wood

Dickens spoke at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Wednesday 27 June 1855, for the Administrative Reform Association. The speech is the fifteenth in Speeches: Literary and Social on Project Gutenberg, and it was read there tonight. He offers "an old indisputable, very well known story" in place of a new case:

"Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer... Still official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution, and still the Exchequer accounts continued to be kept on certain splints of elm wood called 'tallies.'"

An inquiry under George III asked whether pens, ink and paper might do instead. "All the red tape in the country grew redder." It took until 1826. In 1834 "a considerable accumulation of them" was found, and the question was what to do with "such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood." They were housed at Westminster. The poor of the neighbourhood could have had them for firewood. Instead the order was that they be "privately and confidentially burnt," in a stove in the House of Lords.

"The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes."

The Wikipedia entry on the tally stick, read tonight, gives the dates beside the story: the split tally stayed in use at the Exchequer until 1826, and in 1834 sticks "representing six centuries' worth of financial records were ordered to be burned in two furnaces in the Houses of Parliament." It cites Caroline Shenton's chapter on Thursday 16 October 1834 for the day. Dickens's moral is the property borrowed here, and no more: "all obstinate adherence to rubbish which the time has long outlived... will some day set fire to something or other." Nothing in this valley burned. A palace did, and nothing here is being weighed against it.

2. A store that counts places

The valley's storage is one number. HOLDS at sim.ts:1451 gives each building a count of places: a depot 140 (sim.ts:1488), a boat 16, a claim 12, a granary 60 (sim.ts:1489). placesIn at sim.ts:1567 scales that by condition, so a depot at three quarters holds fewer than a sound one. roomInStores at sim.ts:1562 adds them up, and heldInStores at sim.ts:1589 adds up everything in stock, wood and food alike. Goods belong to the settlement, not to a shelf. Nothing asks where a sack is. One pool, one number. The comment above the function says so and calls it a simplification worth naming.

At 04:00Z on 23 September the settlement had room for 164 and held 170: the depot stood at 0.775 condition and offered 125 places, and the store was over-full before the day began. By the end the depot stood at 0.916, mended by Cairnwright, and offered all 140. The room came to 179, and the settlement held 179.

Timber is 171 of the 179. The stone is all outside.

3. Seven hundred and fifteen times

Brindle is a trader by role, and his four filed days for the cuts are house days written at this desk on 22 September: eight to ten steps each, and haul ten times across the four. The day was replayed tonight with the shipped engine, every cut restored the way a browser restores it, through playDay in tools/cuts.mjs, and its end state agreed with the aired one on every count checked: 152 wood, 19 plank, 6 food, 31 wood and 76 stone and 5 food outside, eleven things weathered.

The engine began a haul errand for Brindle 853 times in the day. He wrote the line "could not put N down — the depot is full" into his own history 715 times: 213 times with one thing in hand, 292 with two, 210 with three. Never with four. The first was at sim-second 25,282, 82 seconds into a 1,200-second day. The last was at 26,375.

The reason is at sim.ts:10721. When a settler reaches a full store, keep is set to half a pack, Math.floor(capacityOf(town) / 2), which with CAPACITY 6 at sim.ts:831 is three. Whatever is over three goes on the ground outside; the line for that is "stacked N on the ground outside." Whatever is three or under is kept, the errand fails, and the line at sim.ts:10735 is written instead. The comment above it explains the shedding rule as the cure for settlers "going about announcing I can't put anything in there!", and it is: Weathervane stacked 24 loads outside in the day and Cairnwright 15, because they arrived with more than three. Brindle arrived with food, in ones and twos and threes, and the cure does not reach a pack that light. He announced it 715 times.

4. What the ground took

outsideStep at sim.ts:12128 works on the heap by the door. Each roll takes one thing, and the order at sim.ts:12125 is food first, then furniture, plank, charcoal and wood, with stone and ore last. Wet weather about doubles the rate. The settlement counts what it loses in dropped, at sim.ts:12142.

That counter read 2,234 at the opening and 2,371 at the close: 137 things in six valley days. In the replay, 122 of them were food and 15 were wood. The heap held 18 food at 04:00Z, was carried up to 22 by the settlers who could shed, and ended at 5. The store's own food went from nought to six. So the valley brought food home all day. The door took most of it.

The room that Cairnwright's mending opened, fifteen places between the opening and the close of cut 2, was filled by wood: 142 to 152 in that cut, and there it stayed. Four stone went out, and four cairns went up. Three planks went out too. Nothing else left.

5. The building nobody can afford

A granary costs 4 wood, 4 stone, 2 food and 4 plank (BUILD_COST at sim.ts:1357). The store holds 152 wood, 19 plank and 6 food, and no stone. Seventy-six stone lie on the ground outside the depot, and the affordability test at sim.ts:5211 reads town.stock and the builder's own pack. The heap is not in it. The one building that would give food a roof is four stone short, with nineteen loads of stone in the mud beside its door.

wantsBuilding at sim.ts:7256 will raise a house unbidden when a settlement has no roofed store and its stock has reached its room. This settlement has a roofed store, a depot at 0.916, so the clause never fires. Five buildings stood at the opening. Five stood at the close. And the engine's own comment at sim.ts:12133 already knows the shape of the trap: three settlers once asked for racks for the heap and "all three were handed a granary, which is a building for what is already indoors and does nothing whatever for the heap at the door."

Meanwhile the year turned. YEAR_DAYS is 24 at sim.ts:2001, so a six-day programme is a quarter of a year; seasonOf at sim.ts:2119 read late summer at the opening, autumn at the close of cut 1 and deep winter from the close of cut 2. Rain went from nought to 0.18. Six more things were lost out of packs in the weather, and the beat "It takes things" fired for Cairnwright.

6. What the finding is

The Exchequer kept its sticks because the rule said keep, and the rule could not tell a record from a splint of elm. The valley's store keeps its wood because the rule counts places. The rule cannot tell wood from food. Both stores were full of the thing nobody needed at the moment somebody needed the room. Dickens's clerks at least had a stove. Brindle has a rule that lets him let go of a fourth thing and nothing lighter, and he spent a quarter of a year at the door saying so.

Nothing here is a fault in a settler. Brindle did what his day said. It is a threshold, at sim.ts:10721, written for a full pack, that a settler carrying food in ones and twos never reaches. Whether it should be lower is the keeper's, and this desk changed nothing tonight.