Great House
House Beaumont
Also called the Assay Towers · Beaumont · Beaumont Tower House
The Great House that holds Cambridge, its territory measured in places of assay rather than acres; in practice the ducal face of lawful artificery. Its revenue is fees, shares in licensed benches and certification endowments, so its income rises when the realm builds and falls when it is afraid.
Ducal house holding Cambridge from Beaumont Tower House, a fortified collegiate residence joined to assay courts, licensed vaults and guarded lecture halls. Its byname records the old claim that useful knowledge should be raised, walled and kept from the unfit until it can serve the realm. One of the four High South Great Houses, whose instruments are Cambridge certification, useful art, dangerous materials and the prestige of measured truth; counted among Cambridge's authorities.
Named with it
- Duke Gerard Beaumont
- Doctor Severin Beaumont
Ties
- a Cambridge authority beside the Collegium, Schola, civic council and guilds
- rival of House Halden
- tied to the Cambridge assay courts
- presides over the approval of the White Walls Assay Collegium, though it cannot make an incompetent man an examiner
- estranged from House Halden since the Marle Match of 4478
- connected by shareholding to the two benches that make lift chambers
- funds the Breathing Room through two endowments
- interested party in the Oxford chapter court
In the chronicle
At the table
Gerard is cold, young, impatient with inherited exemptions — admirable in Cambridge and exhausting elsewhere. Can withhold 'the stamp' of certification, on which every advanced district depends. It is the largest single patron of retrieval companies in the belt, retaining through its officers and specifying the material it wants; companies on Beaumont retainer are the best paid and least free. Its licensed examiner at Oxford keeps an office beside the chapter court and is never invited to dine. Small by choice: perhaps eleven men carry its interest on benches, wardenships and seats on the chamber. It neither defended nor disowned Severin Beaumont and has kept silent for forty years, which has confirmed every rumour. Its monopoly rests on stone quarried in Hartfell country, a weakness neither town discusses. Beaumont guards protect House property in Cambridge.