The Poverty of Grendon

The received account describes the former kingdom of Grendon as poor, and proceeds to its conquest with the air of having explained something. Its treasury was poor; considerable numbers of its inhabitants were poorer. Neither observation explains why Sudermark expended men and money upon acquiring a country whose principal visible products were sand and disappointed expectations of rain. The southern mountains contained copper, argentiferous lead and iron of excellent quality. Their ores already supplied workshops in Calder and Harnwood. What the kingdom lacked was the means of bringing much of this wealth into production, and among those means one omission deserves particular attention: its mineral rights were governed by Dwarven law which its own government could not read.

I first encountered the practical consequence at the abandoned workings of Kharset, where I had gone to examine the respiratory complaints of ore-dressers. The district superintendent showed me a plan upon which an extensive copper-bearing ridge was marked exhausted. A Dwarven engine-fitter named Darsa objected that the word meant merely that the company had ceased spending money there. I asked her grounds, somewhat too sharply, having already used the superintendent’s description in a letter to the Collegium. She took me to an exposed face where the copper mineralisation could be followed with no instrument more elaborate than a finger. I withdrew the description and asked to see the company’s papers. Darsa had maintained that this would be more useful than examining the rock. On that occasion she was right twice before luncheon, a distinction which I hope her subsequent employers appreciated.

The papers led backwards through successive failed leases to a grant issued under the old southern federation. The crown had possessed the surface rents and a levy upon ore removed; the deeper workings belonged to an association of hearths whose meeting-house had disappeared centuries before Grendon arose. A separate covenant reserved passage through the lower galleries to the proprietors of a neighbouring drainage adit. Successive royal ministers had assumed that the disappearance of the association’s building extinguished its ownership, and that a blocked gallery could carry no right of passage. Both assumptions were convenient, and neither had any standing in the law under which the grants had been made. The association was dormant, its surviving successor hearths retained their claims, and the obstruction of a passage supplied grounds for demanding its clearance.

These conclusions were available from documents in the royal archive. Unfortunately, the Human clerks charged with advising the crown worked from a vernacular abstract which rendered three distinct interests as “possession” and omitted a clause concerning succession because its first translator had judged it obsolete. Professor Harlowe calls this a reasonable accommodation to contemporary usage. I asked him whether he would accept a reasonable accommodation of the figure in his salary warrant. His answer was more exact than his scholarship. The original instruments used the formal Dwarven learned in Calder as Imperial Dwarven, with the southern federation’s own legal terms. Knowledge of the language was indispensable; knowledge of which government had issued the instrument was equally so. The Great Dwarven Empire had never governed this country, and an Imperial rule concerning abandoned workings could not be imported merely because a northern advocate found it familiar.

There was no mysterious scarcity of readers. Every Dwarf learned Imperial Dwarven, and Dwarven merchants regularly dealt with the kingdom. The failure lay in the royal administration’s refusal to maintain competent readers of its own. An early proposal to employ two permanent Dwarven clerks was rejected on grounds of expense; thereafter the treasury sought translations from interested concessionaries whenever a dispute became unavoidable. Several translations were perfectly honest, though even these answered the questions their purchasers had asked. An official enquiring whether the crown might tax copper received no necessary warning that it could not lease the ground from which that copper would be taken. The government thus sold undertakings it could not fulfil, while investors discovered that a royal seal afforded little protection against a claimant able to produce the governing text.

At Kharset I urged the present lessees to pay for a complete examination of title before purchasing their proposed pumping engine. The chairman observed that I held a chair in physiology. I agreed, and added that even physiology recognised the difficulty of making water flow through a lawsuit. Their subsequent agreement with the successor hearths and the adit proprietors cost less than the engine’s freight. That settlement would have been harder under the Grendon kings, whose grants had repeatedly promised incompatible rights and whose credit suffered accordingly. Yet it establishes the nature of the obstruction. Ore remained underground because nobody could confidently calculate what extracting it would cost, who could prevent its removal, or whose consent would survive an appeal. A country may possess valuable deposits and conduct a substantial trade while remaining desperately short of capital on tolerable terms.

Sudermark’s invasion is more intelligible against this record. The occupying administration’s surviving requisitions include surveyors and Dwarven legal copyists; its provisional revenue schedules anticipate returns from workings which Grendon’s treasury had entered as unproductive. These documents establish an expectation of mineral income. They do not establish that minerals were the invaders’ sole motive, and I know of no evidence sufficient to settle the relative weight of their ambitions. They do show that the apparent poverty of the acquisition offered no contradiction to its desirability. Sudermark was eventually driven out. The grants, covenants and conflicting claims survived the armies.

Calder inherited those obligations with the southern territory. This is why I oppose the recurring proposal to reduce Imperial Dwarven at the Collegium to an antiquarian elective. Our students must learn to distinguish an Imperial instrument from a federal one, and an obsolete practice from an extinguished right. Engineers who neglect those distinctions can design excellent pumps for mines their employers have no authority to drain. Grendon’s poverty was real enough to those who endured it; calling the country inherently poor conceals the administrative choices which helped keep it so. Its rulers possessed an archive describing much of their wealth and repeatedly declined the modest expense of understanding it.