Civic body
Cambridge Guarantor Rooms
Also called Guarantor Rooms · the Guarantor Rooms · the rooms · the registry · the Cambridge rooms
The establishment, under the Collegium's licence and the town council's charter and run almost entirely by women, through which every Afflicted person living in Cambridge passes for examination, classification and the finding of a guarantor; it issues permits and keeps the case ledgers.
The Cambridge rooms that have set down Sarrum's mortality and have been short every year since Cambridge took in some six hundred people, many of them Afflicted, who fled Sarrum in the Well Fever of 4588. A Cambridge body that sent a physician to walk the eastern wells in 4588-89 and took about six hundred people out of Sarrum in a season, many of them Afflicted living unrecorded in the Cinders.
Named with it
- Matron Joan Larke
- Physician Constance Dowe
Ties
- part of Cambridge's permit-and-guarantor regime
- Saint Odilia's records were once marked for transfer to Cambridge
- licensed by the White Walls Assay Collegium
- chartered and funded by the Cambridge Town Council
- runs the Breathing Room and the outskirts custody belt
- linked to the Collegium's record-keeping
- refused by the Cinders mission
In the chronicle
At the table
Speaks the language of evidence and safety but often makes custody feel colder than punishment. Afflicted slang calls Cambridge custody 'a white room'; companies may escort a Cambridge guarantor paper through a hostile ward. It will not opine on the origin of any affliction, which is Oxford's chief doctrinal complaint. About three-quarters of some four hundred examined yearly are permitted; most refusals are for want of a guarantor. The ledgers have been consulted by the Collegium, council and (contested) the Oxford chapter. Joan Larke also rules on papered material in the market.