Date: Fri, 18 Mar 1994 18:01:56 -0500
From: cent@tower.lcs.mit.edu (Pandora Berman)
Message-Id: <199403182301.SAA15227@tower>
To: carolingia@bloom-beacon.mit.edu
Subject: a conceptual hysterical artifact

    Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 10:05:19 -0400 (EDT)
    From: DCROSS@bentley.edu
    Subject: autocrat's pledge
    To: carolingia@bloom-beacon.mit.edu
    ....
    BTW what is the Emergency Medical Fund?
    -Elayne

Consider the following provisos:

1. That in this message I do not speak ex cathedra -- that's "from under
any of my hats", for those who know even less Latin than I do -- but merely
as a senior citizen of Carolingia.

2. That I was not directly involved in what I would here describe, but
heard about it from others, having been either inactive or not yet involved
in politics when these things occurred.  Therefore this explanation is at
best second-hand on my part, and should be salted accordingly.

Now then.  As all Carolingians should know, many years since, this barony
adopted, and the Eastern royalty of that time granted to us, a charter to
protect the ancient rights and liberties of the citizens of Carolingia.
The royalty were Cariadoc and Diana Alene, being the second of those names
to reign in the East, and every King and Queen of the East since then has
ratified that charter.  The charter specifies that at each coronation,
Carolingia will present the new king a rose for his queen, as a token of
"Carolingia's respect for courtesy and gentle arts".

It has become our custom to hold that the king's acceptance of the rose
-is- his ratification of our charter.  As the years have passed, the
kingdom has grown, and some who are not well-acquainted with our ways have
come to the throne, the seneschal also began taking the practical step of
presenting the new royalty with a copy of our charter, so they would know
what they were agreeing to.

Well and good.  But some years after the charter was first granted, though
still many years since, there was some worry among Carolingians that the
then-incoming king proposed to take actions inimcal to our well-being.  I
believe it was feared that he intended to tithe local group coffers to help
finance the kingdom, or something such.  In any case, Council considered
this possibly impending problem, and recommended a line of action to the
Seneschal, who approved it.  The strategy they adopted was to declare all
funds attributable to Carolingia to be part of the "Emergency Medical
Fund", and distributable only for its purposes.  However -- and the reason
Carolingia has continued to function normally since then -- Council and the
Seneschal included one proviso in this decision, that it should not go into
effect unless sitting royalty refused to guarantee us our ancient freedoms
and liberties (including the right to have our bank account unmolested).
The decision as to whether our charter rights were guaranteed or not was
supposed to be made by the Carolingian delegate who presented the rose: if
the guarantee was not made, that gentle was supposed to finish invoking the
EMF by stating aloud (possibly under his breath, if he deemed that
suitable) that it -was- invoked, and then explaining to the royalty that
Carolingia would hold no official events during that reign.

The intent of the EMF, as you can tell from this narrative, was to prevent
the barony from being unduly put upon by the kingdom.  As far as I can
tell, this provision has never been revoked, so it is still in effect, and
therefore it is still theoretically possible for us to decide that incoming
royalty sufficiently offend or threaten Carolingia that it could be
invoked.  However, I suspect it has no great standing in law, and thus
would provide no bar whatsoever to our bank account being chewed up if,
say, the SCA, Inc. went bankrupt.  That's why I suggested that it might
well not be possible to successfully invoke this act.

Eowyn