The Ink Riots

From Kessel Street and Its Charter, a history published by the Binders' Guild in 1213 for the fortieth anniversary of the Kessel Charter. Varrow counts its years from the raising of the first bridge, and every date here is given in that count.

The Fold Duty

In the spring of 1173 the city treasurer, Corwen Ashdown, brought a bill before the council of Varrow. The Chattels (Folded Paper) Bill declared that a fold was the property of whoever owned the paper it was folded from. Every fold within the city was to be registered by its owner, and a yearly duty paid on it, proved by a gummed duty stamp fixed to the fold itself.

The treasurer's case was simple. Kessel Street's folds brought luck to its shops, found its lost deliveries, kept its accounts and carried its messages, and the street paid not a penny for any of it. The council passed the bill in October, by fourteen votes to eleven.

Kessel Street's objections were three. First, that a fold is not owned: it belongs to what it was folded for, and to nobody. Second, that a stamp gummed to a fold's facet is a crease it did not choose, and that by the street's oldest custom forcing a crease on a fold is a crime. Third, and most bitterly, that once a fold was property, unfolding one would become damage to goods, settled with a fine, and no longer what the street had always held it to be, which was killing.

The nine days

• 3 November. The city's duty officers arrive at the Bridge end of the street with an escort from the watch under Captain Edmund Rook, and begin stamping. At Merrow & Daughters, Josiah Merrow pulls down the shutters on their hands. By dusk the street has barricaded both ends: at the Bridge end with bales of paper from the Haverell mill, and at the Bend with type cases and a printing press dismantled from Tallow & Sons.
• 4 November. The first issue of the Barricade Sheet is printed behind the barricade. At the Bend, a paper boat called Bend, the fold of the mill steps, is unfolded flat under a trooper's boot. The street keeps 4 November as its day of mourning still.
• 5 November. Odile Varga, aged twenty-two and a junior clerk of the guild archive, carries the guild's first message over the Bridge-end barricade to the council at the Bridgehouse. She will carry forty more before the end.
• 6 November. The watch tries the river stair at the Bend by night and is driven back. The watch daybook says it was driven back "by birds". The Barricade Sheet says it was driven back by apprentices with buckets.
• 7 November. The bakers of Cheap Row pass bread over the Bridge-end barricade. The council divides.
• 8 November. Master folder Aurelian Gant meets Treasurer Ashdown at the Bridgehouse. They talk for six hours and agree on nothing but the tea.
• 9 November. Rain. The paper bales at the Bridge end swell and hold better wet than they did dry. Captain Rook records this in his daybook "with professional interest".
• 10 November. The council votes to suspend the duty and to treat with the street.
• 11 November. The Kessel Charter is signed in the Binders' Guildhall, before the Guildhall Book. The barricades are down by dark.

The Charter

Its first clause is the one every child on the street can recite:

Within Kessel Street, and within sound of its bells, a fold is a person and not a chattel, and the law shall treat it so.

The clauses that follow make unfolding a fold on the street an offence tried as the killing of a person, and forced refolding an offence too. They charge the Binders' Guild with keeping a register of folds as persons, not property, and with hearing disputes at its own bench, with appeal to the city. The Fold Duty was repealed the following spring.

The people

Hester Pale, printer, edited the Barricade Sheet. She was elected master folder in 1180.

Josiah Merrow, stationer, held the Bridge-end barricade for nine days. His granddaughter keeps the shop today.

Aurelian Gant, master folder, negotiated the Charter and signed it for the guild.

Captain Edmund Rook commanded the watch, kept an honest daybook, and retired in 1180 to keep bees.

Odile Varga carried the messages.

Sources and disputes

Four sources survive, and they agree on surprisingly little.

The Barricade Sheet ran to ten issues. The last, printed on the morning of 12 November as a victory number, is headed Day the Tenth, which is why some accounts say ten days. The street says nine. The Sheet records one death: the boat Bend.

The watch daybook records no deaths at all, because the watch did not count folds. It also records, on the night of 6 November, that paper birds flew at the horses' eyes on the river stair. The Sheet denies that any fold took part in the fighting.

The guild minutes were kept by Aurelian Gant, and record everything that Gant said and very little that anyone else did. They state that Gant drafted the Charter.

The Guildhall Book, asked by the authors of this history in 1213 whether the folds fought on the river stair, stayed folded shut. Gods cannot lie, but they can stay folded shut, and the street has learned to read a closed book as an answer of a kind.

There is a fifth account, which is Odile Varga's own, given to the authors in 1212. She says that the first clause of the Charter was not drafted by Gant, or by the street, but by a letter-fold that delivered itself to the council table at the Bridgehouse late on 10 November, and that nobody has ever learned who folded it.

Asked which account was correct, Miss Varga said, "Mine. I carried the letter."