One Mile Square

By David R. Hall

August 2026

Preface — how this paper reads its document

I have studied the plot of the City of Zion for fifty years. For most of that time I tried to fit it into the nineteenth century, and I failed, as everyone else who has tried has failed. The dimensions do not close on a nineteenth-century mile. The population does not work out to a nineteenth-century household. The twenty-four public buildings serve no nineteenth-century institution. The specification is not defective; the century I was reading it in was the wrong one.

The method of this paper follows from that. I read every word and every graphic in the document in the English of the 1520s and 1530s — the English of William Tyndale’s Bible — and I take its units in the values those words had then. When I do that, the document stops being a puzzle. Its mile closes. Its lots come out round. Its buildings fit their blocks to the inch. Its officers are laymen, unpaid, holding office in a polity where civil and ecclesiastical authority are the same authority — which is what they were in Tyndale’s England and have not been since.

Then I do the second thing, which is the reason the paper exists. Having read the words backward to 1530, I project the community they specify forward. What the specification describes is not a sixteenth-century town and never could have been one. It is a walkable city of ninety-two thousand people in one and a half square miles, each of them with a garden, a window and a vista, governed by nineteen hundred and twenty unpaid part-time officers, in buildings that are their own utilities. Sixteenth-century England could not build that. Neither could the nineteenth century, and neither can we, quite, today. It requires things that are arriving now and are not here yet.

So this is a paper about a future community described in old words. It is not a paper about the nineteenth century, and it does not argue about what nineteenth-century readers meant by anything. Where the nineteenth century appears at all — once, in Part V — it is as evidence, because the men who received this specification substituted the mile of the 1593 statute for the mile the document intends, and you can read that substitution in their street widths.

Three conventions, stated once so I need not repeat them.

I take the text as a facion — a pattern shown, to be made in all things. That is Tyndale’s word at Exodus 25:9: “as I haue shewed the[e] the facion of the habitacio[n] and of all the ornamentes therof, eue[n] so se that ye make it in all thynges.” Mombert’s 1884 edition glosses facion as pattern. A pattern is dimensionally binding. It is not a suggestion, and it is not a sketch.

I measure in rods. The document uses rod and perch interchangeably, which is period-correct: they are the same unit, sixteen and a half feet, and both words were in use. I prefer rod because it is the word Tyndale uses for a measuring instrument, and because the rod is the one unit in this document that had a fixed statutory value before 1530.

Where the text states a dimension I quote it; where the stated dimensions determine a further dimension, I compute it and say so. A specification is complete when its stated parts fix the rest. This one is. The east and west easements are not drawn on the sheet. They are fixed at 330 feet and no other value by three things the document does supply, and a dimension forced by the stated dimensions is as much part of the pattern as one drawn on it.

Where to find things. The explanatory text is transcribed verbatim at Appendix A and the document group listed at Appendix B. Every word on which the sixteenth-century reading turns is set beside its verse, in original spelling, at Appendix C; every dimension in the pattern is tabulated in rods at Appendix D; the household reading is argued in full at Appendix E; and my own community drawings and their figures are audited at Appendix F. Figures 1 to 5 are computed from the text in the accompanying scripts and every number in them is reproducible. Figures 6 to 9 are my own drawings, made before this analysis and independent of it.

Part I — The words are of the sixteenth century

1. Why the century decides the reading

A specification is only as definite as its units. Read the same document in two centuries and you get two buildings.

The document’s units are rod, perch, acre, foot and mile. Four of those five had settled English values before 1530. One did not, and it is the one the whole plan is labelled with. That asymmetry is the hinge of this paper, so Part I establishes it before any arithmetic is done.

2. What was fixed by statute before 1530, and what was not

The Composition of Yards and Perches (Compositio ulnarum et perticarum) is a statute of uncertain date, c. 1266–1303, conventionally ascribed to Edward I or Edward II and sometimes cited as 33 Edw. I st. 6. Its operative words are: “tres pedes faciunt ulnam, quinque ulne & dimidia faciunt perticam” — three feet make a yard, five yards and a half make a perch. And on the acre: “40 perches in length and 4 in breadth make an acre.”

Two things in that ordinance matter for everything that follows.

The rod is the primary unit and the acre is derived from it. Not the reverse. An acre is a shape — a strip forty rods long and four rods broad — before it is a quantity. Keep that shape in mind at §9, because the pattern’s lot is that strip halved along its length.

The rod’s physical length never changed. When the English foot was shortened around 1300, the rod, the furlong and the acre did not shrink; only their expression in feet changed. The rod went from fifteen old feet to sixteen and a half new ones, the acre from thirty-six thousand old square feet to 43,560 new ones, and the ground under a man’s plough stayed the same size. The rod is therefore the most stable unit in English measure, and a document that states everything in rods is a document that can be executed in any later century without ambiguity. Which is exactly what this one does.

3. There was no statute mile, and the pattern supplies its own

The English mile was not defined by statute until 35 Elizabeth I, c. 6, which received royal assent on 10 April 1593. It is worth knowing what that Act actually is. Its enrolled title is “An Acte againste newe Buyldinges” — a public-order statute restricting building and subdivision in and around London. The mile appears in it as machinery, inserted, in the Act’s own words, “to avoide Doubtes that maie arise by reason of this Acte,” because the prohibition applied within three miles of the City gates and somebody had to say what three miles meant. The clause reads:

“And that a Myle shalbe reckoned and taken in this manner and noe otherwise, That is to saye, a Myle to conteyne Eight Furlonges, and everie Furlonge to conteyne Fortie Lugges or Poles, and every Lugg or Pole to conteyne Sixtene Foote and Halfe.”

Note that the Act never says 5,280. Eight furlongs of forty poles of sixteen and a half feet is 5,280 feet, but that is an arithmetical consequence a reader has to work out, and Parliament arrived at it in 1593 to reconcile two older and incompatible reckonings — the Roman thousand-pace mile of about 5,000 feet, and the rod-derived mile of eight forty-rod furlongs. It kept the rod, because rods were written into every deed and survey in the kingdom, and lengthened the mile instead.

Before 1593 there was therefore no such thing as “the” English mile, and what values were in use were consistently longer than the one the statute would settle on:

The variation was not resolved by the statute either. Robert Morden’s county maps of 1695 carry two and three simultaneous mile scales, the local ones always longer; milestones were still cut to the customary mile a century after 1593; and the mile did not become legally uniform across the kingdom until the Weights and Measures Act of 1824. The very phrase statute mile is the linguistic residue of the problem — the qualifier was needed because the bare word had rivals.

So when this document says “This plot containes one mile square,” a sixteenth-century reader learns that the plot is square and that its side is a mile, and he does not learn a number of feet, because no number of feet attaches to the word. He learns the number the way every surveyor of his century learned it: by counting rods. And the document gives him the rods.

In a period when the mile had no statutory value, this pattern defines its own mile in the one unit that did — the rod — and the value it defines is 384 rods. That is not an evasion; it is the only way a pre-statute document could state a mile exactly. And the value is an ordinary one for its century, not an exotic one: it sits inside the attested customary range and near its lower end, below Petrie’s ten-furlong 6,600 feet and well below the 1.56 statute miles still current in the north-west in 1500.

3.1 The printed mile of Saxton’s atlas

There is one place where a pre-statute English mile survives not as a scholarly reconstruction but as a professionally engraved, printed scale: the county maps Christopher Saxton surveyed in the 1570s and published as an atlas in 1579. His sheets carry a scale bar captioned Scala Miliarium — the transcription varies between sheets, Scala Miliarum on Hampshire and Scala milierium on the derivative plates — subdivided and numbered, with a pair of open compasses standing on it. The Gloucestershire sheet of 1577 carries a bar of twelve miles occupying four inches, and Gloucestershire is Tyndale’s own county.

Saxton’s mile is necessarily a customary one: he engraved it sixteen years before Parliament defined the word. So the question is what it is worth, and it is answerable, because a scale bar plus a set of known ground distances determines the unit.

Two independent determinations exist, and they bracket the answer:

The pattern’s mile of 384 rods is 1.20 statute miles. It lies at the bottom of that bracket, and it is exactly Ferrar’s measured figure. The same project’s table of other Tudor and Stuart map-makers puts Mercator 1564 at 1.18, Speed 1611 at 1.22, Norden 1595 at 1.24 and Blaeu 1645 at 1.26, and concludes that the old English mile “was about 1.2 to 1.3 modern statute miles.” The pattern’s mile is the first figure in that range.

Ferrar’s stated derivation should not be repeated, though his measurement should. Alongside the fortress test he offers an arithmetical rationalisation: a statute mile is 63,360 inches, divide by ten to get 6,336, and “convert that number to statute feet.” That is a relabelling of a number, not a conversion, and it is not evidence of anything. His twenty-six measured distances are.

Six thousand three hundred and thirty-six feet is not ten furlongs. Ten forty-rod furlongs are 6,600 feet — four hundred rods, 1.25 statute miles — and that is the figure with the strongest pedigree behind it, Petrie’s. The pattern’s mile is 384 rods, four per cent shorter. Anyone who reaches 6,336 feet by way of “ten furlongs” has made an error, and the error does not become the pattern’s.

Saxton’s Gloucestershire sheet has never been measured in print. The sheet exists and its bar of twelve miles is catalogued, but the unit on it has never been determined in any published source — until §3.3, which reports my own hand measurement of it.

What the Saxton evidence therefore establishes is not that the pattern’s mile is Saxton’s mile. It is something more useful and less arguable: a printed, professionally surveyed English mile of very nearly this length was in ordinary published use in the generation after Tyndale, in the atlas that mapped his own county, before Parliament had defined the word at all. The pattern’s 384 rods is not a figure conjured to make an arithmetic close. It is a working value of its own century, and the pattern states it in rods because rods were the only thing anyone could state it in.

3.2 Gloucestershire had its own measure

One further piece belongs here, and it cuts partly against me, which is why it belongs.

Tyndale was a Gloucestershire man, from the Stinchcombe and Dursley country under the Cotswold edge. Gloucestershire had a documented customary linear measure of its own. Andrew Jones, in “Land Measurement in England, 1150–1350,” reports from the cartulary of St Peter’s, Gloucester, that in the city and county of Gloucester the customary measure until the end of the seventeenth century was to add an inch to each yard, making a yard of thirty-seven inches — the tailor’s or cloth yard, on which a local perch and acre were reckoned.

So local measure in Tyndale’s county was real, documented, and outlasted the statute by a century and a half. That is worth knowing, and it supports the general proposition of §2 and §3: that in this period measure was local and the statute was aspirational.

But it does not support a long Gloucestershire mile. A thirty-seven-inch yard is a ratio of 37 to 36 — about 1.028 — which would give a mile of some 5,427 feet, close to the statute figure rather than far above it. And the long perches of eighteen to twenty-four feet that Jones documents belong to Cheshire, Lancashire and the north, not to the west; Petrie’s 1.56-mile survival is likewise located in “the north-west of England and in Wales,” across the Severn from Tyndale rather than in his own county.

So I do not claim that Gloucestershire used a 6,336-foot mile. What I claim is what the evidence carries: that the word mile had no statutory value in Tyndale’s lifetime, that measure in his own county demonstrably departed from statute, that the printed miles of the following generation’s atlases run from 1.18 to 1.26 statute miles, and that the pattern’s 384 rods is a value inside that range which its own components fix without ambiguity.

3.3 Stonehouse, and my own measurement

Saxton’s Gloucestershire sheet has in fact been measured — by hand, for a building project, years before this paper existed.

In the 1990s I built a plant in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire. Local residents there told me — as settled local knowledge, not as something I brought with me — that the county had used a mile of 6,336 feet in Tyndale’s era, reckoned not in feet but in rods: 384 rods to the mile, the same unit and the same figure this pattern closes on. They also pointed me to where it could be checked: Christopher Saxton’s county map.

On that lead I bought reproductions of the old Gloucestershire sheets myself and measured them — town to town, against the sheet’s own scale bar — rather than take the local account on trust. The distances closed on a mile of 6,336 feet, squared: the same figure Ferrar’s fortress-to-fortress test returns for Saxton’s general map of 1579, and the exact figure this pattern’s 384 rods yields.

This is one researcher’s hand measurement of a single sheet, made for a building project years before this paper existed, and resting partly on local oral tradition. It supplies exactly the gap named above: Saxton’s Gloucestershire has been measured, by hand, on paper bought for the purpose, and the figure it returned — independently of Ferrar, and years before I had read him — is 6,336 feet: 384 rods, the pattern’s own mile.

4. Foursquare, and measured with a rod

The document describes a square city, laid out in rods, with its dimensions given as counts of rods. That is not an idiom a man invents. It is Revelation 21 in Tyndale’s English.

Tyndale, 1534, Revelation 21:15–16:

“And he that talked with me had a golden read to measure the cite with all and the gates therof and the wall therof. And the cite was bylt iiii. square and the length was as large as the bredth of it and he measured the cite with the rede .xii M. fur longes: and the lenght and the bredth and ye heyth of it were equall.”

A city built four square. A measuring instrument. Length equal to breadth. A dimension given as a count of a customary unit. Every formal property of the plot of Zion is in those two verses, including the one this paper spends Part II establishing — that the length equals the breadth.

The instrument is a read — Tyndale’s spelling of reed — and at Revelation 11:1 he makes the equivalence with the rod explicit: “And then was geven me a rede lyke vnto a rodd and it was sayd vnto me: Ryse and mete the temple of god and the aultre.” To mete is to measure. The reed is a rod. A man told to mete a temple with a rod, in 1530, is being told to do exactly what a surveyor does with a sixteen-and-a-half-foot pole.

And foursquare is Tyndale’s own word for a plan whose sides are equal, at Exodus 27:1 on the altar — “five cubits long and five cubits broad, that it be fouresquare” — and again at Exodus 28:16 and 30:2. At Revelation 21:16 he happens to write it with the numeral, “iiii. square”; in the Pentateuch it is solid. Both are his.

For the books Tyndale did not live to translate, the same vocabulary is there in Coverdale’s completion of 1535. Coverdale’s Ezekiel 40:3 and 40:5 give the measuring man “a threde of flax in his honde, and a meterodde also,” and measure the house with it: “the meterodde that he had in his honde, was six cubites longe & a spanne.” A mete-rod. The instrument of the two great measured-city visions in scripture, in the English of the 1530s, is a rod.

5. Court, curtain, habitation: the vocabulary of the building

The document’s public building is described in courts. So is Tyndale’s Exodus.

This settles three readings that otherwise look like eccentricities.

An inner court is a room, not a yard. Tyndale’s court at Exodus 27:9 is an enclosed space defined by hangings on its sides — a bounded interior, dimensioned in cubits. So a building whose principal dimension is given “in the inner court thereof” is being dimensioned internally, at its enclosed assembly space, and the outer courts wrapped around it are further enclosures. That is exactly how §13 builds the 88 × 132-foot building outward from a 55 × 65-foot inner court, and it is why the outward build is the natural reading rather than a clever one.

Curtains divide courts. The building’s assembly hall is divided by soundproof curtains running in a six-inch easement at each end of the inner court. Curtains as the dividing fabric of a measured sacred enclosure is Exodus 26 in as many words, and it is the reason the end courts exist at all — the curtain has to run somewhere, and where it runs is dimensioned.

And the pattern is binding. “Se that ye make it in all thynges.” A document written in that register does not expect to be adapted. It expects to be executed to the dimension. Part V is about what happened when it was not.

6. Captains over ten, stewards, and men of wisdom

The pattern’s governing structure — captains of ten, stewardships, and ground to be laid off “according to wisdom” — is not administrative jargon. It is Tyndale’s Exodus and Deuteronomy.

Tyndale, 1530, Exodus 18:21:

“Moreouer seke out amonge all the people, men of actiuite which feare God and men that are true and hate covetuousnes: and make them heedes ouer the people, captaynes ouer thousandes, ouer hundredes, ouer fyftie, and ouer ten.”

And Deuteronomy 1:15, which is the more remarkable of the two for this document:

“And then I toke the heedes of youre trybes, men of wysdome and that were expert, and made them ruelers ouer you: captaynes ouer thousandes and ouer hundredes ouer fystye and ouer ten, and officers amonge youre trybes.”

Three things come out of that verse together, and they are the three things the pattern’s governance rests on.

The captain of ten is scriptural and it is the smallest unit of office. Not a committee, not a ward, not a parish — a man over ten. The pattern’s captain of ten serves ten households on one floor of one House, and there are 3,840 of them (§20). The office is Tyndale’s, the number is the pattern’s.

Rulers are chosen for wisdom and expertise, not for rank. “Men of wysdome and that were expert.” Tyndale gives the same verse both words, ruelers and captaynes, for two Hebrew terms, and he qualifies the men by capacity rather than by station.

And “according to wisdom” is a term of art, not vagueness. The pattern leaves exactly one dimension open — the barn and stable ground, which “must be laid off according to wisdom.” Read in 1833 that phrase looks like an evasion. Read in Tyndale’s Deuteronomy it is a delegation to the men of wysdome who are the appointed layers-off, and it means: this dimension is determined by the requirement, not by the drawing, and the men who hold office will compute it. §10 computes it, and it comes out to whole rods.

For stewardship, Tyndale’s Luke 16:1–2 gives “a stewarde” and “Geve a comptes of thy steward shippe” — accountable custody of another’s property, rendered up on demand. That is the pattern’s tenure: participants are stewards of assets the community owns, and they account for them. (At 1 Corinthians 4:1 Tyndale renders the same Greek office differently — “disposers of ye secretes of God” — which is worth knowing, because it shows he chose steward at Luke 16 for the property sense specifically.)

7. Congregation, elder, overseer: why the officers are unpaid laymen

This is the part of the sixteenth-century reading that does the most work, and it is the part that cannot survive translation into any later century.

Tyndale made five renderings that Thomas More and the church authorities attacked, and they are the five that matter here:

Three of them stand in a single verse. Tyndale, Acts 20:28, 1534:

“Take hede therfore vnto youre selves and to all the flocke wherof the holy goost hath made you oversears to rule the congregation of God which he hath purchased with his bloud.”

and at 20:17 the 1526 reads “called the seniors of the congregation,” revised in 1534 to “called the elders of the cogregacion.” One verse pair, three of the five renderings, and a documented revision between the two editions.

What made these renderings dangerous was not philology. It was that they dissolve a professional priesthood. Tyndale said so himself, in his Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue of 1531, explaining why he would not write church:

“the clergy … had appropriate unto themselves the term that of right is common unto all the whole congregation of them that believe in Christ; and with their false and subtle wiles had beguiled and mocked the people, and brought them into the ignorance of the word; making them understand by this word church nothing but the shaven flock of them that shore the whole world.”

A congregation of elders under overseers is a body of laymen. There is no clerical caste in it, no ordination that sets a man apart from the people he serves, and no benefice to live on. David Daniell’s judgement on the five words is that Tyndale “cannot possibly have been unaware that those words in particular undercut the entire sacramental structure of the thousand year church throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa.”

Now read the pattern’s officer corps in that light. Nineteen hundred and twenty public servants, each with an office and a seat, serving in four-year terms, unpaid, part-time, chosen for experience and successful participation, replaced one in four each year, holding no station that outlasts the term. Twelve thousand more if you count the captains of ten, who work from their own front rooms. Read in any century with a professional clergy or a salaried civil service, that is an absurdity — nobody can staff a city of ninety thousand with unpaid part-timers. Read in Tyndale’s ecclesiology it is not merely possible, it is the only arrangement consistent with the vocabulary. Elders and overseers are not paid. They are the congregation, holding office in turn.

That is the single strongest reason to read this document in the 1530s rather than later. The governance model is unintelligible in a world of paid clergy and paid officials, and it is the ordinary expectation of the world Tyndale was writing for.

8. Church and state are the same authority

One more feature of the period makes the pattern coherent, and its absence is why the pattern reads oddly to us.

In England before the Reformation and through its first years, ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction were not separate systems. The church courts held jurisdiction over probate, matrimonial causes and divorce, defamation, moral discipline, and the enforcement of tithe as a legal right. The Crown’s own statute of 1533 says so in the act of taking that jurisdiction over: the Act in Restraint of Appeals, 24 Hen. VIII c. 12, transfers to the king’s courts “causes testamentary, causes of matrimony and divorces, rights of tithes, oblations and obventions,” declaring that this realm is an empire whose supreme head holds “plenary, whole, and entire power, pre-eminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdiction” over spiritual matters as well as temporal. The Act of Supremacy followed in November 1534. That Parliament had to legislate the transfer is the proof that the two authorities had until then been one.

R. B. Outhwaite’s study of the English ecclesiastical courts takes exactly this ground: probate, marriage and divorce, tithes, defamation and lay disciplinary prosecution stayed in the church’s courts until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the royal courts took them over. (The parish’s later career as a unit of civil administration is a development of the sixteenth century and after, not a feature of its beginning, and I do not rest anything on it.)

So in the pattern’s own period, an officer is simultaneously a civil and an ecclesiastical officer, and there is nothing hybrid about it. The twenty-four public buildings are courts in both senses at once — assembly halls for worship and for the school, and chambers for the community’s business, in the same room on different days, which is precisely what the section of the building shows. A storehouse that receives tithe is a civil granary and an ecclesiastical institution together. The community’s trustees, agents and regulators are church officers. None of this needs to be reconciled, because in 1530 there was nothing to reconcile.

This is the concept I project forward, and it is the hardest one. A modern reader will want to know which of the pattern’s institutions are religious and which are municipal. The answer is that the question is anachronistic to the document, and the design does not answer it. What carries forward is not an established church but the structural feature: one body of unpaid officers, holding one set of offices, responsible for the whole of a community’s life rather than a sector of it.

Part II — The measure closes

9. What the text fixes

Every figure here is in the pattern’s own explanatory text, transcribed in full in Appendix A. Nothing in this table is inferred.

The lot, and the acre’s shape. The manuscript reads “each lot is 2 4 perches perches, in front and 20 back making ¼ of an acre.” The 2 is struck and overwritten with 4. Four rods by twenty is eighty square rods — half an acre, not a quarter — so the trailing “¼ of an acre” belongs to the abandoned two-rod frontage and was not brought forward when the frontage was corrected. Four by twenty is the operative dimension, and §11 shows it is the only reading that gives a round lot count.

And notice what four by twenty is. The statutory acre of the Composition is a strip forty rods long and four broad. The pattern’s lot is that strip halved along its length: twenty by four. The lot is not a rectangle chosen for convenience. It is the statutory acre-strip, halved, and it is stated in the order the ordinance states it — the breadth in front, the length back.

The block. Forty rods square is 1,600 square rods, ten acres exactly, and forty rods is the acre-strip’s own length. So the block is one acre-length square, and it holds twenty half-acre lots in two rows of ten. Every areal figure in the pattern is built from the ordinance’s strip.

10. The plot closes as a square of 384 rods

10.1 The blocks and the streets

Seven blocks and eight streets on the north–south axis — the streets bound the plot as well as divide it:

7 × 40 + 8 × 8 = 344 rods = 5,676 feet

Six ordinary blocks, the central range at sixty, and eight streets on the east–west:

6 × 40 + 60 + 8 × 8 = 364 rods = 6,006 feet

That is the city proper: 344 × 364 rods, 782.6 acres. The two axes are unequal. Neither is a problem, because the city is not the plot.

10.2 The one dimension left open, and the convention that closes it

Beyond the streets the text places ground that is not street:

“On the north and south of the plot where the line is drawn is to be laid off for barns stables &c for the use of the city so that no barns or stables will be in the City among the houses the ground to be occupied for these must be laid off according to wisdom.”

Three things in one sentence. The ground is at the drawn line — it straddles the boundary rather than sitting inside it. It is not a street, so the eight-rod uniformity clause does not touch it. And its width is delegated to the men of wisdom (§6), which is to say: computed from the requirement.

The requirement is squareness, and the convention is the ordinary one of the craft. In laying off a plot, an easement is divided half to each side of the boundary it straddles; the boundary line runs down its centre and the outer half belongs to what lies beyond. That is what makes “where the line is drawn” a dimensional statement.

10.3 The east and west easements are determined

The north and south easements are drawn and bracketed at 660 feet. The east and west are not drawn. They are nonetheless fixed, and fixed uniquely, by three things the pattern does supply: that the plot is square, that the city measures 344 × 364, and that half of each easement lies within the boundary.

North and south: half-width = (384 − 344) ÷ 2 = 20 rods, so the easement is 40 rods = 660 feet

East and west: half-width = (384 − 364) ÷ 2 = 10 rods, so the easement is 20 rods = 330 feet

Both results are module figures, not remainders. Forty rods is one block width. Twenty rods is one lot depth. And the two easements differ by twenty rods — exactly the amount by which the central range elongates the east–west axis. The asymmetry is not arbitrary; it is the elongation of the central range, carried out to the boundary.

They are not drawn because they did not have to be drawn. A reader with the text can compute them, get whole rods, and close the square. That is what a pattern does, and it is why the absence of a line on the sheet is not the absence of a dimension.

10.4 Both axes close

Both axes close on 384 rods

384 rods = 6,336 feet = 921.6 acres. A true square, on the pattern’s own numbers, to the inch. Length as large as the breadth of it.

The plot as specified: seven blocks by seven, the central range sixty rods deep, and the barn easements whose centrelines are the boundary

10.5 The scale statement agrees

The text gives the scale as forty rods to the inch. The sheet measures 9¼ × 8⅞ inches, which at that scale is 370 × 355 rods.

Both margins are small and positive, which is what a drawn sheet with an edge margin gives. Two further points make this a confirmation and not a coincidence. The sheet is not square — 9¼ by 8⅞ is a ratio of 1.042, against the city’s 1.058 and a square’s 1.000. And a mile of 320 rods at that scale would need exactly eight inches on both axes, which is neither dimension of the sheet. The scale statement, the enumeration, and the sheet’s own proportions all describe the same rectangular city inside the same square plot.

11. The lot count is exactly 960

Take the four-rod frontage and the text’s own alternation rule: lots run north and south in one block and east and west in the next, meeting at “the line through the middle of the square,” except in the central range where all lots run north and south.

Forty rods divided by four gives ten lots to a row and two rows to a block: twenty. In the central range the sixty-rod dimension runs east and west while all lots run north and south, so each row carries fifteen: thirty. Nine hundred and sixty lots exactly.

The round total confirms the four-rod reading — the abandoned two-rod frontage would give 1,920 — and it confirms the text’s own stated purpose for the alternation, that “by runing all the lots in these squares North and south it makes all the lots in the City of one size.” Nine hundred and sixty is the number on which every count in Part III turns.

12. The central range is fifteen acres because the buildings require it

The central range is forty rods by sixty, fifteen acres, where every other block is forty by forty, ten acres. This is the load-bearing decision in the whole plan, and the twenty-four buildings force it.

The text puts twelve buildings on each of two painted blocks and sets a floor on their size: “none of these temples are to be smaller than the one of which we send you the draft.” The accompanying draft gives a building whose inner court is fifty-five feet by sixty-five. So no public building may be narrower than sixty-one feet in any dimension, and none may be smaller than that inner court.

Fit twelve on a square ten-acre block, three across and four along, with the text’s own eight-rod setback and a four-rod gap:

across: (660 − 2 × 132 − 2 × 66) ÷ 3 = 88 feet

along: (660 − 2 × 132 − 3 × 66) ÷ 4 = 49½ feet

Eighty-eight feet is fine. Forty-nine and a half is under the floor, and well under it. Twelve buildings of the specified minimum do not fit on a ten-acre square block. They never did.

Now the same on forty rods by sixty:

across the 660-foot dimension: 132 + 88 + 66 + 88 + 66 + 88 + 132 = 660 ✓

along the 990-foot dimension: 132 + 132 + 66 + 132 + 66 + 132 + 66 + 132 + 132 = 990 ✓

Twelve buildings of 88 × 132 feet, three across and four along, at the text’s eight-rod setback from every edge and a four-rod gap between neighbours, consume the fifteen-acre block on both axes to the inch. Two such blocks hold the twenty-four; the third holds the storehouses.

So the chain runs: the size floor forces a block larger than ten acres; the enlargement goes on the east–west axis, elongating it by twenty rods; the elongation transfers to the boundary as the twenty-rod difference between the easements; and the plot closes square at 384. Every apparent irregularity in the plan is a consequence of the building programme, and every one of them is exact.

The painted block, and the building built outward from a 65 × 55 inner court

The floor also settles which way the twelve are arrayed. Three across and four along gives 88 × 132 and clears it; four across and three along gives 49½ × 198 and breaches it. Three across, four along.

13. The building, three ways

13.1 Inward, from the block

Section 12: twelve buildings, the stated setback and gap, the fifteen-acre block. 88 × 132, closing on both axes.

13.2 Outward, from the inner court

The draft’s inner court is 55 × 65 feet. Build outward from it in rods — and remember from §5 that a court in this vocabulary is an enclosed room, so building outward from an inner court to a series of outer courts is what the word invites:

Both axes close to the inch, and every increment except the two curtain easements is exactly one rod. The 132-foot axis is eight rods. The intermediate figure is worth naming on its own: the assembly hall without its outer court is 55 × 99 feet, and ninety-nine feet is six rods exactly.

13.3 The section, and one check from outside

The section divides the seventy-foot height into three bands, not five:

Five storeys of fourteen feet is seventy, and the bands sum to seventy. The building is 88 wide by 132 long by 70 high, and each of those is fixed by something else.

Then a test that owes nothing to this document or its century. A National Basketball Association court is 50 × 95 feet. In the 55 × 99 court it leaves two and a half feet each side and two feet each end:

50 + 2(2.5) = 55 ✓ · 95 + 2(2) = 99 ✓

Both axes to the foot. The largest indoor court in ordinary modern use fits the pattern’s assembly hall with a walkway and fits nothing smaller. That tells us nothing about the sixteenth century; it tells us that 55 × 99 is a real assembly dimension and not an artefact of arithmetic.

Transverse section of the community building: two stacked assembly courts, each with a lower part for the sacrament and an arched higher part for the schools, over a ground floor level with the village breezeways

The section also places the offices, which §14 needs. Floors 2 and 4 are taken by the two double-height courts, so the offices occupy floors 1, 3 and 5 — twenty-four to a floor, each 8.25 feet wide, half a rod — with eight more on the ground floor flanking the pools:

24 × 3 = 72, + 8 = 80 offices to a building

14. Four courts, 480 seats, 1,920 offices

14.1 Court and part are two scales, not two words for one thing

The pattern’s received texts use both. Two houses are commanded, each “fifty-five by sixty-five feet … in the inner court,” and “there shall be a lower court and a higher court.” Separately the inner court is divided so that “the lower part of the inner court” is for the sacrament offering and “the higher part of the inner court” is for the school.

Read in the vocabulary of §5 the distinction is not a redundancy. A court is an enclosed room; a part is a division within one. So: two houses, two courts each — four courts — and inside each court a lower part for the sacrament with a higher part above it for the school. That is what the section draws, and the two-band stack of §13.3 is the reason the building is seventy feet and not thirty-five.

14.2 The court seats 480

The seating geometry closes independently: twenty-four chairs of twenty-four inches across the fifty-five-foot width takes forty-eight feet and leaves three and a half feet of aisle each side; twenty rows at four feet takes eighty feet of the ninety-nine. 24 × 20 = 480.

Note that the officer series here — 12, 24, 48, 96 — is a doubling series, and it is not the decimal series of Exodus 18. The pattern uses both: the doubling series for the quorums that fill the courts, and Tyndale’s decimal captains over ten for the 3,840 who serve the Houses. Two series, two functions, no overlap.

The lower court of building 5, division A: 480 seats and the structure that fills them

14.3 One thousand nine hundred and twenty, four ways

Four routes from four unrelated domains, agreeing to the unit. The fourth decides it, because the 480 presidencies are named individually and sum with no remainder:

Every term is a member of the doubling series or a whole multiple of it. Four hundred and eighty presidencies of four is 1,920, which is the office count, which is the seat count of four courts. The governance structure and the seating plan are the same object counted twice.

Two mechanisms make an unpaid part-time corps of that size work, and both are of the sixteenth century rather than ours. A four-year term with one of the four replaced each year in a fixed order is rotation by rule, so succession never depends on an election. And the same seat in each of the four courts constitutes the presidency, so a presidency is defined by geometry rather than convened — the four men who hold seat 207 in the four courts are a presidency because they hold seat 207. An office that is a place rather than a rank is the natural form of office in a congregation of elders (§7), and it is very nearly unthinkable in a bureaucracy.

14.4 The numbers predate the Plat

Objection 7 below (§28) used to concede that the four courts and the quorum series come from texts of a later date than the vocabulary, without arguing their provenance. They do not come later. The doubling series is fixed nineteen months before a lot is drawn, and by June 1833 every element the four-person presidencies require is in place.

A revelation of 9 February 1831 gives the stewardship, the bishop and the storehouse — the law the pattern assumes throughout. A second, of 11 November 1831, fixes the doubling series of §14.2 outright: a president over twelve deacons, over twenty-four teachers, over forty-eight priests, over ninety-six elders, each charged to “set in council with them” and “teach them their duty.” The same text names a president of the high priesthood “to preside over the whole church” — recognized before the year is out, and given two counselors, a presidency of three, within months. By 1833 that presidency of three has matured from one office peculiar to one man into a general form, equally available to any of the four courts rather than reserved to the church president alone.

The Plat itself is not drawn until the following spring. When the two houses that elaborate it are commanded — fifty-five by sixty-five feet in the inner court, “a lower court and an higher court” — the text says so “according to the pattern which I have given unto you”: words that presuppose the Plat rather than introduce it. That is why this paper follows the section’s date in every edition from 1835 to 2013, 6 May 1833, rather than the reassignment to 2 August: a command to commence work on a pattern already given cannot postdate the pattern’s own mailing to Missouri seven weeks later. A rebuke for failing to act on that same command follows on 1 June, dividing the inner court into “a lower part” for the sacrament and “a higher part” for the school — the two-band stack of §13.3 and §14.1. Three days after that, on 4 June, the further pattern promised for the courts came by vision to Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon and Frederick G. Williams; Williams recorded it afterward, and it was altered in transmission exactly as the Plat itself was altered that August (Part V).

By June 1833, then, the doubling series (November 1831), the four courts (May and June 1833) and the seating geometry that populates them (§14.2) all existed together. Nothing here waits on the 1835 reorganisation: §107 formalises quorums this pattern had already numbered four years before.

What never existed is the presidency of four. Every presidency the historical record recognizes is a presidency of three, seated together within one court, and constituted for advocacy rather than for governance. A presidency of four is a different object — the same seat held across all four courts at once, its four offices placed together in one of the twenty-four buildings, beside the three presidencies of three with whom it forms a council of twelve. The pattern specifies it. No one built it.

15. The rod halved seven times

Every dimension anywhere in the pattern is the rod halved or doubled. Seven increments, a factor of sixty-four, nothing outside the set.

This quantises lengths, which is a stronger statement than the nesting of areas in §16. A design whose smallest and largest dimensions are both powers of two times one unit was not assembled from convenient round numbers. It was generated from the unit.

And the unit is the right one for the purpose. Of every measure in the document, the rod is the one that had a fixed statutory value before 1530 and never physically changed thereafter (§2). A pattern expressed in rods is executable in any later century without recalculation. A pattern expressed in miles is not. The document states its parts in the durable unit and its label in the perishable one, which is exactly the wrong way round for a nineteenth-century reader and exactly the right way round for a sixteenth-century one.

Part III — The community the measure describes

16. The ladder

One module across six orders of magnitude

Every level is a whole multiple of the rod or of the level below it, and the span from the suite to the region is a factor of thirty-eight million. Four of the thirteen levels are stated outright; two more are determined by what is stated; the rest belong to the pattern as projected, and every one of them lands on the rod.

17. The House, its floor, and the suite

17.1 What the text fixes and what it leaves

The text gives a lot of four rods by twenty, one House on it, set twenty-five feet back, a grove in front and gardens behind, built of brick and stone. Nine hundred and sixty of those Houses must hold the population. That is the whole of what is fixed, and it is nearly enough.

Frontage is fixed at sixty-six feet by the lot. Depth is fixed at 132 feet — eight rods, the same increment as the street and the public building. Height is four floors over a commercial ground floor. And the requirement that every resident have a window, a garden and no facing building fixes the section: rooms on the two long faces, shared space inboard.

17.2 The floor closes in quarters

Sixty-six feet divided by 4.125 is sixteen quarter-rod slots to a side. Fourteen ordinary suites plus one double-width accessible suite occupies exactly sixteen, giving fifteen suites a side and thirty to a floor at capacity. Two ranges thirty-three feet deep, back to back, give a floorplate of 66 × 66 — sixteen square rods exactly.

The suite is 4.125 × 16.5 feet: a quarter rod by a rod, a quarter of a square rod. Each suite carries a matching 4.125-foot slice of the shared family room, itself a rod deep. Two consequences follow from the linear slice, and neither is designed in.

Shared space per person is constant at 68.06 square feet whatever the group size. A group of two and a group of fifteen each give every member 68 square feet private, 68 shared, and 36 of floor foyer. Group size changes the character of the shared room and nobody’s entitlement.

An accessible suite is exactly two ordinary suites. Statutory accessible width is double the ordinary width, so it takes two slots — which is why fifteen suites and not sixteen fit across sixty-six feet, with two accessible suites to a floor, one each side.

Nothing is let by the single suite. The minimum tenancy is two, and where one is accessible the minimum is three, because the accessible suite is double width. The narrow bed, bath, desk and window modules facing the street or the garden open through a private roll-up door into the shared family room, so each resident has privacy and the group has sociality without either being bought at the other’s expense.

17.3 One house per lot, and ninety-six people in it

The clause is “No one lot in this City is to contain more than one hous & that to be built 25 feet back from the street leaving a small yard in front to be planted in a grove according to the taste of the builder the rest of the lot for gardens &c all the houses to be of brick and stone.”

That describes the House exactly:

Nothing in the clause says how many households the one house holds — and in this vocabulary a house is a household before it is a structure. The household sense is the biblical one throughout: Tyndale’s Acts 16:31 is “thou shalt be saved and thy housholde.” Multi-household houses of four and more floors are documented for early modern London, where a single Cheapside street-front householder answered for an average of 6.6 persons. One House to a lot and ninety-six persons in it are the same provision, read in the register the document is written in. Appendix E sets out the evidence in full.

18. The village is a spatial unit, and the text names its boundary

An ordinary block holds twenty lots in two rows of ten, meeting at what the text calls “the line through the middle of the square.” A row of ten lots is ten Houses is 960 persons — one village. So an ordinary block is exactly two villages, divided by the one internal line the text troubles to describe.

Eighty-four of the ninety-six villages are precisely a row of ten lots on one side of that line. The twelve others come from the four central-range blocks, whose rows of fifteen do not divide by ten, so those villages cut across rows. The village is a spatial unit for seven-eighths of the city, and its boundary is the line the text describes.

A district of four villages is forty lots, which is two ordinary blocks exactly. Twenty-four districts of forty lots is 960.

19. The population is 92,160

The text says the plot is “supposed to contain from 15 to 20 thousand people.” Read as households, the chain closes with no residual.

Divide 92,160 by 19,200 heads of household and the implied household is 4.80 persons, which is Peter Laslett’s mean of 4.75 for a hundred English communities between 1574 and 1821, to two decimals. The two readings — nineteen thousand heads at early modern household size, and thirty-eight thousand modern households at 2.4 — land on the same population because 4.8 ÷ 2.4 is exactly two. That is not a coincidence in the design’s favour so much as an arithmetical consequence of the fact that households have halved in size, and it is the reason the same pattern can be occupied in either century.

The district count falls out rather than being chosen: ninety-six villages in fours is twenty-four districts, and the text provides twenty-four public buildings.

20. The officer corps

Nineteen hundred and twenty office-holders and 3,840 captains over ten is 5,760 officers, and both numbers come from the text’s own provisions — the twenty-four buildings and the 960 Houses.

At fifteen to twenty thousand persons, between a quarter and two-fifths of every man, woman and child in the city holds office. That is not an implausible density; it is an impossible one. At 92,160 it is one in sixteen, which is about the share of adult men in a lay-officer society — and a lay-officer society, per §7, is precisely what the vocabulary describes.

This is the decisive argument for the household reading, and it runs on the document’s own numbers alone — no lexicography, no census history, no claim about the word people. It should lead wherever the reading is presented.

The corps divides by workplace with nothing left over. The 1,920 hold the half-rod offices on floors 1, 3 and 5 of the twenty-four buildings. The 3,840 captains work from the four ground-floor apartments beside each House’s entry foyer, which are their offices. No officer commutes, and no officer needs a second room. That is what makes part-time and unpaid service physically possible: the office is where the officer already lives, or a walk away in his own district.

21. Belt, mirror, diamond

21.1 The text distinguishes two exterior zones

Not one, and the distinction carries weight.

“On the north and south of the plot where the line is drawn is to be laid off for barns stables &c for the use of the city … the ground to be occupied for these must be laid off according to wisdom” — at the boundary, straddling it, and delegated for computation.

“On the North and South are to be laid off the farms for the agraculturists a sufficient quanty of land to supply the whole plot and if it cannot be laid off without going too great a distance from the city, there must also be laid off on the east and west” — sized by requirement, and explicitly expected not to fit on two sides.

The first is the barn easement of §10.3, dimensioned by squareness. The second is sized by production, and the text’s own contingency — that it may have to go on all four sides — is the seed of the diamond.

21.2 The mirror

The pattern forbids animals inside the city in as many words and provides for them immediately outside. Carried through on the pattern’s own module, that gives an exact mirror: every block in the square has a twin beyond the easement, at the same size, on the same streets, with the same lots. The mirror is the same 1.44 square miles, so the inner community is 2.88 square miles — the walkable city and its walkable industrial and agricultural counterpart, with the barn easement’s outer half already belonging to the mirror by the convention of §10.2.

That is why the easement is split rather than wholly inside. Half of it is the city’s edge and half is the mirror’s, and the road down its centre serves both. The freeway in the 660-foot easement is 66 feet and in the 330-foot easement 33 — in each case exactly one tenth of the easement carrying it.

21.3 The diamond is what the grid makes

On a rectilinear street grid, distance travelled is the sum of the two axial legs, not the straight line. A square’s corner is therefore twice as far from the centre as the midpoint of its edge, and the locus of equal hauling cost is not a circle but a diamond, set at forty-five degrees to the grid.

So a supply zone drawn for equal delivery time is a diamond, and one drawn as a square wastes its corners. The diamond is not a stylistic choice; it is the isochrone of the pattern’s own street network. That the community plan draws it as a stepped diamond is the confirmation: a rectilinear grid can only approximate the diamond in block-sized steps, and the plan steps it in blocks.

The supply diamond

The land-use rings inside it follow the ordering von Thünen set out in Der isolierte Staat in 1826: whatever costs most to move per unit of value sits closest in. Intensive garden behind every House; permaculture and market crops within the diamond; grazing, grain, mining and drilling in the leased hinterland. The ordering is not asserted — it is what minimises haulage, and each activity sits where the minimum puts it.

21.4 The region

Three thousand six hundred and eighty-six persons to the square mile while feeding itself is 2.75 times Dutch density, and the Netherlands achieves its output on heavily imported feed. This is the most demanding claim in the pattern — more demanding than the building, the governance or the servicing — and it is the one that rests on yield rather than on geometry.

The growth sequence is what makes it answerable. The first community takes one corner of the ten-mile square; the second, third and fourth follow in order as productivity increases. No community is founded until the yield of those already standing can spare the land, so the region is never over-committed and the density is never required on the first day. Fifty such squares connect into one economic area of 3.75 to 5 million people.

22. What the alternation buys

The text gives its own reason for the alternation of lot direction — to make every lot in the city one size. It buys three further things, and each is a quality of life rather than an arithmetical convenience.

No House faces another House. Because adjacent blocks run their lots at right angles, the fronts on any street look across at the sides and gardens of the next block rather than at a facing row of fronts. Every resident has a vista, and the text says what is in it: a grove in front, gardens behind.

Every street is a public square. At 132 feet wide with a twenty-five-foot planted setback each side, the space between built faces is 182 feet. That is not a road. It is the market square of the pattern’s own century, and it is what a street was before it was a carriageway — which is why the pattern can specify 132 feet of it in front of every dwelling without extravagance.

The circulation is quarter-rods throughout. The enclosed breezeway connecting villages is 24.75 feet: three lanes of 8.25, each lane two paths of 4.125. Walking innermost, then cycles and boards, then robotic carriers and light pods outermost, one way clockwise around the block with hub traffic anticlockwise. The narrowest circulation dimension in the design and the width of a private suite are the same number, a quarter of a rod.

Part IV — Forward: why this is a future community

Everything in Parts II and III is arithmetic on a text. This part is the projection, and I mark it as such: it is my judgement, formed over fifty years, about when the pattern becomes buildable.

23. What the pattern requires that no earlier century could supply

The pattern is not a sixteenth-century town and was never buildable as one. Nor was it buildable in the nineteenth century, which is why every attempt to execute it then failed at the first block. Five requirements are load-bearing, and every one of them is either new or not yet here.

1. Unpaid part-time government needs machine administration. Nineteen hundred and twenty officers serving four-year terms without compensation, plus 3,840 captains over ten, cannot carry the record-keeping, scheduling, accounting, allocation and compliance load of a city of ninety-two thousand as a side occupation. In any earlier century the work would have forced a paid bureaucracy, which is exactly what the vocabulary of §7 forbids. Artificial-intelligence agents are what make the load carriable by part-time laymen — they do the clerical work that would otherwise create a professional class. This is the single requirement that has changed most in the last five years, and it is the reason I think the pattern is now closer than it has ever been.

2. Building-scale utilities need high-temperature ceramic fuel cells. The pattern puts no barn, stable, works or utility in the square, and the mirror carries industry outside. For 960 Houses and 24 public buildings to be habitable at this density without a municipal utility grid, each building must be its own utility — water, sewer, waste, power, heat and cooling. High-temperature ceramic fuel cells running on a distributed fuel, with heat recovery, are the technology that makes a building self-sufficient at that scale. They are close; they are not deployed.

3. Universal ownership needs robotics. The pattern’s participants are stewards of assets they rent from the community and operate themselves (§6). There is no employee class in it. For every participant to be an owner-operator rather than a hired hand, the productive tools have to be operable by one person — which is a robotics requirement. A self-levelling, lifting, tipping personal platform that serves as chair, table, desk, barrow, tent and bed, with power, water and air aboard, is the specific form that requirement takes.

4. The density needs the data. A community that allocates suites by group rather than by unit, rotates 1,920 offices annually, meters every building’s own utilities, and tracks the stewardship of every asset it owns generates far more data per person than a conventional municipality. That intensity is beyond current practice.

5. And it needs an appetite for walkable density that does not yet exist. Ninety-two thousand people in one and a half square miles, five storeys, no private car inside the square, everything within a walk. Every objective quality is there — a window, a garden, a park in front, no facing building — and it is still further than most people now want to go. My own estimate is that acceptance is at least five years away and possibly twenty-five.

24. What this means for the reading

The projection forward is not decoration on the historical argument. It is the reason the historical argument matters.

A pattern that could have been built when its words were written would be a lost town plan. A pattern that closes to the inch on units fixed before 1530, describes a governance model that only a congregation of unpaid elders makes sense of, and requires technologies that arrived in the last decade or have not arrived yet, is a different kind of object. It is a specification whose vocabulary is of one century and whose execution belongs to another.

That is why reading it in its own century is not antiquarianism. The 1530s reading is what makes the dimensions close; the forward projection is what makes them worth closing. Neither half stands alone. Read only backward, the pattern is a curiosity in an obsolete unit. Read only forward, it is an unfounded proposal about the future. Read both ways it is what I take it to be: a complete, executable specification for a community, stated in the most durable unit English measure ever had, waiting on the tools.

Part V — Why the nineteenth century could not execute it

This is the only place the nineteenth century enters, and it enters as evidence rather than as context. Thirteen town plats laid out between 1833 and 1861 by men who held this pattern in their hands can be compared on the parameters it states. What the comparison shows is not carelessness. It is a substitution — of one mile for another — and it is legible in the street widths.

25. The statute-mile substitution, read in the streets

Seven blocks of forty rods consume 280 rods. The pattern’s eight streets of eight rods bring that to 344, and the barn easements close the square at 384 (§10). Now suppose a reader takes mile to mean the mile of the 1593 statute — 320 rods — and needs seven forty-rod blocks to fit inside it. The remainder, spread over eight streets, is:

(320 − 280) ÷ 8 = 5 rods = 82½ feet

Eighty-two and a half feet is the street width that forces a statute mile. It is not a default American street width, and it is a distinctly odd figure to arrive at by any other route. And it appears, immediately and repeatedly, in the work of the men who received the pattern:

Far West is the clean case, because every circumstantial explanation can be excluded there. It was flat, open, unencumbered prairie, a single section bought whole and in advance by the pattern’s own recipients — no river bend, no bluff, no prior survey, no piecemeal purchase. And there, on ground that imposed no constraint at all, the street width is 82½ feet.

They were not narrowing streets to save land. They were narrowing the one dimension the pattern declares uniform, in order to make “one mile square” come out at 5,280 feet. That is the whole transmission failure in one number. The pattern’s mile is a count of rods; they read it as the statute mile of 1593; and to make the substitution fit they had to break the uniformity clause. Every other divergence in the record follows from having lost the unit.

26. What travelled, and what did not

Every parameter moves

Once the unit is gone, nothing holds. Lot size rises rather than falls — half an acre, then one acre at Far West, Adam-ondi-Ahman and Nauvoo, then a quarter more than that at Salt Lake City, where the enlarged lot is documented as sized to hold “gardens, barns, and places for livestock,” each lot becoming “a minifarm with animals, barns, and gardens.” That inverts the pattern’s most explicit rule: the plot that forbade barns and stables inside the city was succeeded by one that put them on every lot. Block size reverses three times. Street width reverses repeatedly — 132 uniform, then 132 and 82½, then 66 and 99, then 82½ and 132, then 49½, then 132 again. There is no trend to fit, which is what rules out resource constraint as the explanation: constraint reduces monotonically, and this record does not.

The one provision that declines monotonically

One provision does move monotonically, and it is the one that carries everything in Part III. The pattern names all twenty-four public buildings individually. The August revision keeps twenty-four but drops the storehouse block; Kirtland, laid out the same month, provides three; Far West provides one; and no plat drawn afterwards anywhere provides more than one.

Twenty-four buildings is twenty-four districts, ninety-six villages, four courts of 480, 1,920 offices, 5,760 officers, and one adult in sixteen in office. Reduce twenty-four to one and none of it survives — not because the geometry fails, but because the congregation of elders has nowhere to sit. The grid travelled and the government did not. Streets, blocks, lots, the square and even the 132-foot dimension all reappear somewhere in the record. The provision that made the pattern a constitution rather than a subdivision appears nowhere.

The comparison in full, split across two tables for legibility; the same thirteen plats in the same order in each. Assembled from the Joseph Smith Papers editorial apparatus, BYU Studies, National Register nominations and the Encyclopedia of Mormonism; where sources conflict, the better-attested value is given.

Table 26a — extent, blocks and lots

Table 26b — streets, reservations and public buildings

Dimensions in linear units where documented: Zion and Kirtland blocks 660 ft square; Far West 396 ft square (24 rods); Adam-ondi-Ahman 36 × 32 rods; Salt Lake City 660 ft square with lots 165 × 330 ft; Brigham City 40 × 20 rods with lots 132 × 165 ft; St. George 528 ft square with lots 132 × 264 ft. Nauvoo’s linear block dimensions could not be established in any accessible source.

Part VI — The argument

27. Why the arithmetic is the evidence

The claim of Parts I and II is dimensional, and dimensional claims are testable in a way interpretive ones are not. Four properties of the evidence are worth naming.

It is reproducible. Every figure in Part II is computed from the transcribed text alone, in the accompanying scripts. The block count, the street convention, the easement widths, the lot count, the building fit and the closure of the square are each one line of arithmetic on stated numbers. Any reader with the transcript can reproduce or refute them.

It is overdetermined. The 88 × 132-foot building arrives three ways — inward from the block, outward from the inner court, and from the section. The figure 1,920 arrives four ways, from architecture, the quorum series, land division and the organisation chart. The 344 × 364 city is confirmed by the enumeration, by the independently published acreage, and by the sheet’s own scale statement and proportions. Overdetermination cannot be produced by a lucky choice of assumptions, because a wrong assumption fails on at least one route.

It closes exactly. Twelve buildings consume the fifteen-acre block on both axes to the inch. Both axes of the plot reach 384 with no remainder. The lot count is 960 with nothing left over. The presidencies sum to 480 with nothing left over. Exactness is the discriminating property: a merely plausible reconstruction leaves residues, and this one leaves none.

And the modulus is finer than the argument requires. A pattern assembled from round numbers would be quantised at the rod. This one is quantised at an eighth of a rod, seven halvings down, in the width of a footpath. Nothing in the historical argument needs that. It is true anyway, and it is the strongest single indication that the whole scheme was generated from the unit rather than fitted to it.

28. Objections

1. Reading a document in a century other than the one it is dated in is illegitimate. The paper does not claim a date; it claims a register. A register is a matter of vocabulary and units, and it is testable. The test is whether the reading makes the document work. In the sixteenth-century register the mile closes, the lots come out round, the buildings fit, and the officers are unpaid laymen in a polity where that is the norm. In any later register the mile fails, the lots do not divide, the buildings do not fit their blocks, and the officer corps is an absurdity. A register that resolves every dimension is the correct register, whatever the date on the sheet. Part V shows what the alternative register produces when applied: 82½-foot streets and a broken uniformity clause.

2. Six thousand three hundred and thirty-six feet is not a standard old English mile. It is not a standard anything, because before 1593 there was no standard. The claim is that the mile had no statutory value in the period, that the customary values in use were all longer than the statute mile, and that a pattern needing a definite mile then had to define it in the one unit that was fixed — the rod. This one defines it as 384 rods. That value lies inside the attested range; it is exactly the figure one cartometric test of Saxton’s 1579 scale bar returns, and four per cent below the ten-furlong 6,600 feet that has the strongest scholarly pedigree (§3.1). I do not claim it is Saxton’s mile. I claim it is a working value of its own century, fixed here by the document’s own components.

3. The east and west easements are not on the drawing, so the square is imposed. They are not on the drawing; they are in the arithmetic. The text states the plot square and states every block and street dimension. With the split convention the north and south brackets themselves display, the east and west widths follow uniquely — and they land on module figures, one block width and one lot depth, rather than on remainders. A specification is complete when its stated dimensions determine the rest.

4. The 88 × 132-foot building appears in no source. Correct: it is determined, not quoted. But it is determined three ways from independently stated numbers, it closes on both axes to the inch, and the 55 × 99 court inside it accommodates the largest indoor court in modern use with a two-and-a-half-foot walkway. That is a considerably stronger object than a plausible reconstruction.

5. The population reading depends on people meaning householders. The decisive argument does not depend on it. §20 shows that the pattern’s own building and officer provisions cannot serve fifteen to twenty thousand persons, because that puts between a quarter and two-fifths of the population in office. That runs on the document’s numbers alone. Appendix E sets out the lexical case, including what it cannot carry.

6. The forward projection is speculation. It is judgement, and Part IV labels it as such. It is also separable: Parts I to III stand entirely without it. If the enabling technologies never arrive, the pattern remains a complete and determined specification that cannot be executed — which is a different thing from an incomplete one.

7. The four courts and the quorum series come from texts of a later date than the vocabulary. They do not. The doubling series is fixed on 11 November 1831, nineteen months before the Plat; the two houses that name the four courts follow it in May and June 1833; and §14.4 sets out the chronology in full. What §5 and §14.1 add is that the words — inner court, lower and higher court, lower and higher part, curtain — are the vocabulary of Tyndale’s Exodus, read in that vocabulary as a two-band stack rather than a redundancy. The reading is lexical; the dates are earlier, not later.

Appendix A — The explanatory text, verbatim

The transcript of page 1 of the sheet, in Frederick G. Williams’s hand. Square brackets are editorial reconstructions of text lost to three edge tears; angle brackets are Williams’s own insertions; doubled words are his uncancelled false starts.

Explanation— This p[lot] [con]taines one mile square all the squares in <the> plot containes ten acres each being 40 rods square you will observe that the lots are laid off alternate in the squares in one square runing from the south and North to the line through the middle of the square and the next the lots runs from the east and west to the middle line each lot is 2 4 perches pe[rc]hes, in front and 20 back making ¼ of an acre in each lot so that no one street will be built on intire<ly through the street> but one square the houses stand on one street and on the next one another except the middle range of squares which runs North and south in which range are the painted squares the lots are laid off in these squares North and south all of them because these squares are 40 perches by 60 being twenty perches longer than the others the long way of them being east and west and by runing all the lo[ts] [in] these squares North and south it makes all the lots in the City of one size

the painted squares [in the] middle are for publick buildings the one without any figure is for store houses fo[r] [the] [Bishop] and to be devoted to his use figure one is for Temples for the use of the pres[idency,] the circles inside of the square are the places for the temples you will see it containes twelve f[igures] 2 is for the Temples for the [lesser Priesthood] it also is to contain 12 Temples the whole square <plot> is s[upposed] to contain from 15 to 20 thousand people you will therefore see that it will require 24 building to supply them with houses of worship schools & none of these temples are to be smaller than the one of which we send you the [draft] this [Temple] is to be built in square number marked figure one and to be built where the circle is which has a cross on it.

On the north and south of the plot where the line is drawn is to be laid off for barns stables &c for the use of the city so that no barns or stables will be in the City among the houses the ground to be occupied for these must be laid off according to wisdom wisdom. On the North and South are to be laid off the farms for the agracultur<i>sts a sufficient quanty of land to supply the whole plot and if it cannot be laid off without going <too> great a distance from the city, there mus[t] also be laid off on the east and west where this square is thus laid off and supplied lay off another in the same way and so fill up the world in these last days and let every man live in the City for this is the [City of Zion] [all the streets a]re of one width. being eight perches wide als[o the space round] the painted sq outer edge of the painted squares is [to be eight perches between] the Temples and the street on every side

The Scale of the plot is 40 perc perches to the inch

No one lot in this [City] is to contain more than one hous & that to be built 25 feet back from the street lea leaving a small yard in front to be planted in a grove according to the taste of the builder the rest of the lot for gardens &c all the houses to be of brick and stone

Appendix B — The document group

Every drawing in the group is Williams’s. The recorded sequence: drawn after early June and mailed 25 June; receipt confirmed in Missouri 29 July; a revision prepared during August, after the Kirtland plat was drawn; Orson Hyde and John Gould carried it to Jackson County after 18 August, arriving late September; Partridge proposed a further revision of the building arrangement by late September; the expulsion of November 1833 ended the attempt. Part V is about what that sequence shows.

The explanatory text exists in two places only: on the sheet itself and in the letterbook copy. There is no third witness.

Appendix C — The sixteenth-century lexicon, verse by verse

Every term in the pattern that carries a dimensional or institutional load, set against the English of the 1520s and 1530s. Tyndale’s New Testament is quoted from the 1534 revision in original spelling, his Pentateuch from the 1530 Antwerp edition; where he did not live to translate a book, Coverdale’s completion of 1535 is quoted and identified as such.

The measure

The building

The governance

Corrections a reader should carry. Several of these differ from the wordings familiar from the King James Version, and the differences matter for a paper that rests on register.

Revelation 21:16 in Tyndale is “iiii. square,” the numeral form; “fouresquare” solid is his in the Pentateuch.

Exodus 26:1 and 27:9 read “habitation,” not “tabernacle” — though tabernacle is his elsewhere in the same chapters.

Acts 16:31 is “thou shalt be saved and thy housholde,” not “thou and thy house.”

1 Corinthians 4:1 is “disposers of ye secretes of God,” not “stewards of the mysteries” — so Tyndale’s choice of steward at Luke 16 is deliberate and property-specific.

Coverdale’s Isaiah 11:12 is “a token,” not “an ensign”; his Malachi 3:10 is “euery Tythe in to my barne,” not “all the tithes into the storehouse.”

Exodus 18:21 and Deuteronomy 1:15 read “ouer fyftie, and ouer ten,” in the singular, not “fifties and tens.”

Appendix D — Every dimension in the pattern, in rods

Lengths — the rod halved and doubled

Two dimensions in the pattern are not on the chain, and both are stated in feet by the texts that give them: the 25-foot house setback, which the pattern states outright, and the 6-inch curtain easement at each end of the inner court. The 55 × 65-foot inner court is likewise given in feet by the accompanying draft, and it is the seed of §13.2 rather than a product of the module.

Areas

Two exact coincidences worth recording. The assembly hall and the House’s floor allowance are both twenty square rods. And the twenty-four public buildings’ footprints together are 24 × 11,616 = 278,784 square feet, which is exactly one one-hundredth of a square mile.

Counts

Appendix E — The household reading

Part III reads “the whole plot is supposed to contain from 15 to 20 thousand people” as heads of household rather than persons. This appendix sets out what supports that reading, what does not, and why the decisive argument (§12) does not need it.

E1. What has documentary support

One source states the exclusions explicitly. R. G. Lang (ed.), Two Tudor Subsidy Rolls for the City of London, 1541 and 1582, London Record Society vol. 29 (1993), Introduction: “In general, heads of households comprised the population at risk in assessment for the subsidy based on valuations of wealth … it is clear that servants, wives, and children were not subject to valuation for assessment.” This is the explicit statement the premise needs. Two qualifications: Lang describes liability to assessment rather than an enumeration, and the same page notes that only about a quarter of London householders were assessed in 1582.

The 1563 Diocesan Returns enumerated households. Dyer and Palliser state it flatly; Moore confirms that “bishops were required to return the numbers of households in each parish and chapelry.”

The multiplier is correctly attributed. Laslett’s mean household size of 4.75 across a hundred English communities, 1574–1821, is genuinely his and genuinely the Cambridge Group’s standard sample. The working range is 4.3–5.0, and resident servants are counted inside the household, not added to it.

Three sixteenth-century sources perform the conversion themselves, which is better evidence than any modern method statement:

“Houseling people” are communicants, roughly age ten to fourteen and over, so the last two understate total household size and the adjusted figures are comparable. All three bracket the 4.80 the Zion chain requires.

“House” carried the household sense in 1828. Webster’s American Dictionary gives, as sense 9, “In Scripture, those who dwell in a house and compose a family; a household.” Multi-household houses of four or more floors are documented for early modern London — Cheapside street-fronts where “each householder answered for an average of 6.6 persons.”

E2. What the lexical case cannot carry

Early English enumerations did not uniformly count householders. The 1524–25 lay subsidy counted individual taxpayers; the 1603 ecclesiastical survey counted communicants, i.e. persons; the 1676 Compton instruction asked for “persons or at least families”; and Gregory King’s 1696 table has the columns Number of families, Heads per family, Number of persons, converting 1,360,586 families into 5,500,520 persons. King is the seventeenth century’s own demonstration that a household count is not a population figure.

The 1524–25 subsidy is the contested case, and the standard citation cuts the other way. Goose and Hinde: “some historians have treated the Exchequer Lay Subsidies of 1524–25 as if they provide a list of heads of household … But in fact the subsidies were payable by all males aged 16 years or over, as both Roger Schofield and John Sheail pointed out in their PhD theses.” Alan Dyer defends the household reading, so the point is live rather than lost, and should be cited to Dyer as a dispute.

The 1522 Military Survey names dependents in places. Hoyle’s Gloucestershire edition describes “exhaustive lists of inhabitants,” with “servants follow masters and occasionally adult children follow their parents,” and “A few are women, thus making the point that the return is not a muster either.”

By 1830 the word had settled the other way, and that is the point. The nineteenth-century federal census counted persons: its published title is Fifth Census; or, enumeration of the inhabitants of the United States, 1830, and the Census Bureau’s own summary is that it “counted the population only.” The household was the unit of collection — one line per family, only the head named — but every wife, child, servant and slave was tallied and rolled into a total of persons. Webster’s American Dictionary of 1828 gives nine senses of people and none is householders. And in the county to which the pattern was sent, in the same summer, a citizens’ address distinguishes “some twelve hundred souls” for persons from “each family” for households.

So a nineteenth-century reader would read “people” as persons, and in his own register he would be right to. He would then divide fifteen to twenty thousand persons among the lots, get fifteen to twenty to a dwelling, conclude the rate was unrealistic, and correct it by multiplying the lots — which is exactly what the revision of August 1833 did, cutting the per-dwelling rate to “a more reasonable six to eight.” That is the same substitution as the statute mile of Part V, made in the same weeks by the same hands: a word taken in the reader’s register rather than the writer’s, and a dimension then adjusted to make the misreading fit.

E3. Where the case does rest

The reading is carried by register, not by census practice. In the English of the 1520s and 1530s the household sense is the ordinary biblical one — Tyndale’s Acts 16:31, “thou shalt be saved and thy housholde” — and Webster’s 1828, three centuries later, still flags that sense of house as Scriptural, which is to say: surviving in the Bible and not in common use. The pattern’s whole document set is written in that surviving register. Its buildings are houses; its measures are rods and perches; its drawing is a plot in the older spelling; its officers are elders, overseers, stewards and captains over ten; its one open dimension is to be laid off according to wisdom; and Appendix C sets every one of those words beside its verse. Part I establishes that the rod layer is the layer on which everything closes. A document that is sixteenth-century in its units, its instrument, its offices and its spelling is sixteenth-century in its word for a household too.

And the strongest argument does not need the premise at all. The officer ratio of §20 shows that the pattern’s own building and officer provisions cannot serve fifteen to twenty thousand persons, because that would put between a quarter and two-fifths of the entire population in office. That runs on the document’s own numbers, and it is the one to lead with.

Sources for this appendix

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Dyer & Palliser (eds), The Diocesan Population Returns for 1563 and 1603, RSEH n.s. 31 (OUP/British Academy, 2005); Dyer, “The Bishops’ Census of 1563,” LPS 49 (1992), 19–37; Goose, “The Bishops’ Census of 1563: a re-examination,” LPS 56 (1996), 43–53.

Appendix F — The design corpus in figures

Two sheets carry the design’s own statement of itself: a transcript of the pattern with its text set out and its easements dimensioned, and a master community drawing dated 8 May 2025. Both were examined in full. Every arithmetical claim on them is set out here with its check, because the agreements are the paper’s evidence and the two open choices are the reader’s to weigh.

F1. The transcript sheet dimensions all four easements

The sheet redraws the plat with the explanation set out in full and adds what the manuscript leaves to arithmetic. Reading the dimension chain from the boundary inward:

The chain 132 / 660 / 132 inside the easement centrelines is the confirmation that matters: the perimeter streets are inside the city and count in full, and the easements straddle the boundary. That is the convention §10.2 states and §10.3 uses.

The sheet also fixes the orientation the design is drawn in — east at the top, north at the left — so the central range of fifteen-acre blocks reads as a horizontal row, and the twelve buildings on each painted block as three across by four along.

F2. The area schedule closes line by line

Two of these lines are independent statements of figures Part II derives. The district-building line is 88 × 132 × 5 with the fifteen-acre block carried alongside it as 990 × 660. The hub line’s 99 × 99 is the same six rods that §13.2 derives for the assembly hall and §13.3 checks against a basketball court.

F3. The office geometry

“There are (24) 8.25′ wide offices that are accessible from each of floors 1, 3, and 5. 24 × 3 = 72 equal offices all accessible from common hallways. In addition there are (4) 8.25′ wide offices that are located on the first floor east and west of the pools. 72 + 8 = 80 offices. 80 × 24 = 1,920 offices providing a uniquely placed office for every public servant who also has a uniquely placed seat in one of the 4 assembly halls.”

An office is 8.25 feet wide, exactly half a rod, and half a square rod in area. The offices take floors 1, 3 and 5 because floors 2 and 4 are the two double-height assembly courts of §13.3 — so the count is 72 rather than 120, and it follows from the section rather than being chosen.

The remaining officers are placed too: “The 4 first floor apartments that are next to the entry foyers of each apartment building dual as offices for the 960 × 4 = 3,840 captains of 10 households.” The corps of 5,760 divides by workplace with nothing left over — 1,920 in the twenty-four public buildings, 3,840 in their own front apartments.

F4. The building programme

The master sheet gives the height as 72 feet with twelve feet between floors, which also closes at six levels. The section’s 70 feet at fourteen is the figure this paper uses: the band structure sums to it, and the master sheet’s own metric conversion of 21.25 m is 69.7 feet.

F5. Governance and population

F6. The transport section

Each freeway is exactly one tenth of the easement that carries it — 33 in 330, 66 in 660 — a rule the sheet does not state but observes. The three lanes are ordered by speed rather than by any hierarchy of mode: walking innermost, then bicycles and boards, then robotic carriers and electric pods, all one way clockwise, with hub traffic anticlockwise.

F7. The two figures that are choices, not findings

The supply acreage. Three statements on the sheet do not reconcile, and the difference is a factor of 9.4.

The second and third agree with each other and with the diamond of §21.3. The first is a productivity calculation; the others are geometric. §21.4 uses the geometric figure and states the yield assumption openly, because a nine-fold gap is exactly the size of gap that intensive garden, permaculture and vertical production are claimed to close, and the growth sequence gives the design time to close it.

The House floorplate. Three of the corpus’s own figures describe the same quantity.

The 66 × 66 reading is sixteen square rods exactly, and it agrees with §17.2’s independent derivation from the quarter-rod slot — sixteen slots across the sixty-six feet, two ranges thirty-three feet deep back to back. That is the figure this paper uses; the third is the building’s footprint on the lot rather than its floorplate.

F8. What the corpus states independently, and where this paper derives it

The master sheet was drawn before this analysis existed and without reference to it.

Ten independent agreements. Where a figure on the sheet is off the module — the finest increment is printed as 2′-3¾″, where the halving chain gives 2′-0¾″ — the chain is followed.

Appendix G — Sources

Measure: the units and their statutes

35 Eliz. I, c. 6 (1593), “An Acte againste newe Buyldinges” — the mile clause, s. 8. Original spelling from the ; modernised in Ruffhead, Statutes at Large II (1763), , and Pickering VI, .

Composition of Yards and Perches (Compositio ulnarum et perticarum), c. 1266–1303 — the rod at 16½ ft and the acre at 40 × 4 perches. ; English text in ; Latin in .

W. M. Flinders Petrie, “Weights and Measures,” Encyclopædia Britannica 11th ed., vol. 28, — the ten-furlong old English mile of 6,600 ft, and its survival at 1.56 statute miles in north-west England and Wales “till 1500.”

I. M. Evans, “A Cartographic Evaluation of the Old English Mile,” Geographical Journal 141:2 (1975), 259–64 — .

David I. Bower, “Saxton’s Maps of England and Wales: The Accuracy of Anglia and Britannia and Their Relationship to Each Other and to the County Maps,” Imago Mundi 63:2 (2011), 180–202 — ; author’s list of eprints at .

Ifor M. Evans & Heather Lawrence, Christopher Saxton, Elizabethan Map-Maker (Wakefield Historical Publications / Holland Press, 1979) — the standard monograph.

Old Hampshire Mapped, and — the scale bar of ten miles chequered in half-miles; the mile computed at 1.22 statute on the catalogue page and 1.25 in the summary table; the project’s own accuracy caveats.

M. J. Ferrar, Cartography Unchained (2008), and the — the scale bar as fifty miliarium in 57.5 mm, the twenty-six-pair Roman fortress test, and the conclusion of 1.2 statute miles.

Chubb’s catalogue of the printed maps of Gloucestershire, at — Saxton’s Gloucestershire, 1577: “SCALA MILIARIUM, 12 [=4 inches],” with an open pair of compasses standing on the bar.

Andrew Jones, “Land Measurement in England, 1150–1350,” Agricultural History Review 27:1 (1979) — . The Gloucester customary yard of thirty-seven inches, in use “until the end of the seventeenth century,” from the cartulary of St Peter’s, Gloucester; and the long perches of the north.

Ronald Edward Zupko, British Weights and Measures (1977), 10–11, 20–21 — the c. 1300 shortening of the foot, and the rod, furlong and acre keeping their physical size while changing their expression in feet.

Robert S. Dilley, “The Customary Acre: an Indeterminate Measure,” Agricultural History Review 23:2 (1975), 173–76 — . Customary measure outlasting statute measure into the nineteenth century; perches of 5 to 8½ yards in local use.

Julian Hoppit, “Reforming Britain’s Weights and Measures, 1660–1824,” English Historical Review 108:426 (1993), 82–104 — . The standard account of the period.

Weights and Measures Act 1824, 5 Geo. IV c. 74 — . Its preamble is the best short primary citation for the persistence of variant measure.

Edmund Gunter’s chain of 66 feet dates from 1620 and is therefore not part of this pattern’s vocabulary — . All dimensions here are stated in rods for that reason.

The English of the 1520s and 1530s

Tyndale’s New Testament, 1534 revision, original spelling — , cross-checked against .

Tyndale’s New Testament, Cologne 1525 fragment and Worms 1526, modernised spelling — .

Tyndale’s Pentateuch, Antwerp 1530 (under the false imprint of Hans Lufft at Marburg) — J. I. Mombert, William Tyndale’s Five Books of Moses, called the Pentateuch, being a verbatim reprint of the edition of M.CCCCC.XXX (1884), ; modernised at . Mombert’s own glossary gives facion = pattern at Exodus 25:9.

Coverdale’s Bible, 1535, for the books Tyndale did not translate — · .

William Tyndale, An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (1531), Parker Society ed., 13–14 — “the shaven flock of them that shore the whole world.” .

David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (Yale, 1994) — on the five contested renderings.

· · — dates: born between 1488 and 1494; strangled and then burned at Vilvoorde, October 1536, the precise day uncertain.

Church and civil jurisdiction in the 1530s

Act in Restraint of Appeals, 24 Hen. VIII c. 12 (1533) — “causes testamentary, causes of matrimony and divorces, rights of tithes, oblations and obventions.” .

Act of Supremacy, 26 Hen. VIII c. 1, November 1534 — .

R. B. Outhwaite, The Rise and Fall of the English Ecclesiastical Courts, 1500–1860 (Cambridge, 2007) — .

Spike Gibbs, “State Formation I: the Parish,” in Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2023) — . The parish becomes a unit of civil administration over the sixteenth century; nothing here rests on it.

The dating of Sections 94 and 95, and the November 1831 quorum revelation

Revelation, 11 November 1831, Revelation Book 1, pp. 122–23, JSP — hand of John Whitmer, then Oliver Cowdery. The doubling series (12 deacons, 24 teachers, 48 priests, 96 elders) and the office of president of the high priesthood “to preside over the whole church.” Substance later assembled into Doctrine and Covenants 107 (1835).

“Revelation, 2 August 1833–B [Doctrine and Covenants 94],” Revelation Book 2, p. 64, JSP — hand of Frederick G. Williams. House for the presidency, the 55×65 inner court, “a lower court and an higher court,” “according to the pattern which I have given unto you.” Dated 6 May 1833 from its first publication in 1835 until the Joseph Smith Papers’ 2013 reassignment to 2 August; §14.4 gives this paper’s reasons for keeping the traditional date.

Doctrine and Covenants 95, 1 June 1833 — the lower and higher part of the inner court, and the school.

Doctrine and Covenants 97, 2 August 1833 — retrospective language (“the pattern which I have given”), read in §14.4 as evidence of compilation rather than simultaneous reception.

The document group

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JSP place pages: · · ·

Successor plats and settlements

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Utah and the Wasatch Front

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Comparative literature

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Further comparative literature: · · ·

A modern reinterpretation, not a reading of the documents (§4)