Joan Sedley’s goods come to five pounds and three shillings. Since the Act of 1529, an inventory of a dead person’s goods and chattels was required where those goods exceeded five pounds. Her estate clears that line by three shillings. Value the cow a little lower, or leave the twenty shillings Richard Hale owes her off the page, and there is no document at all — no three neighbours walking the rooms, no list, nothing of her on paper but a burial.

Eight shillings in the hall, twenty-two in the chamber, fifty-three in the yard: eighty-three shillings of goods. Add Hale’s twenty and the total is a hundred and three, which is five pounds and three shillings, which is what the poem says. The arithmetic holds. What the sum does not contain is the last entry on the page: twelve shillings owed her by the parish for nursing the Widow Coombes through her last sickness, filed as supposed desperate — the period’s term for a debt nobody expects to see again.

The genre is handled by someone who knows it. Appraisers were two or three local men, usually neighbours, and indifferent here is not indifference but its older sense, impartial, the quality the job requires. Sperate and desperate are the real categories: recoverable and not. A flock bed is the poor relation of a feather one. Sad-coloured wool is a trap for the modern ear — it means sober, deliberately subdued, and not sorrowful, and the poem uses it correctly while letting the other reading sit there. Six hives empty since Michaelmas: a skep-keeper killed the colony over a sulphur pit to get the honey out, though the taking-up is usually dated to St Bartholomew’s in August. Michaelmas is the quarter day, when rents fell due and accounts were reckoned, which is the clock a document like this one keeps. The room order, the andirons, the form, the valuation in shillings — all of it is right.

Joan Sedley was a healer. She owned a book for the curing of agues and the setting of bones, in her own hand, and it is appraised at one shilling, which is what a broken chest with nothing in it is also worth. The other book is a Bible with her name written in the front in a hand not her own. So: the book she was given, inscribed by somebody else, two shillings; the book she made, one. And the twelve shillings at the bottom of the page are what the parish owes her for doing the thing the one-shilling book is about.

That is the whole argument of the poem and it is made entirely in numbers. Her vocation cannot be valued by this procedure. As an object it is worth a shilling. As labour it is worth twelve shillings that will not be paid.

The appraisal can price a cow at fifty shillings — three-fifths of everything she owned — and can do nothing whatever with the fact that she sat up with a dying woman.

The twelve shillings appear after the attestation. We set our hands to this, being present, and having examined all of it, and found nothing we have cause to doubt — and then, below the signatures, the desperate debt. In a real inventory the appraisers’ subscription closes the document; the order runs goods, debts, total, names. I could not establish whether desperate debts were routinely counted in the sum or kept out of it. The position, though, is not in question. Whatever a real inventory did with such a debt, it did it above the signatures. This one is printed after three men have sworn they examined everything, which means the thing they did not examine is the thing she did for someone else.

Nothing found inside it worth the naming. The fire not out when they came in. Giving less than she once did. Carded and not spun. And, of the medical book, in her own hand this time. No appraiser writes this time. It is a narrator’s aside, two words long, pointing back at the Bible to make sure the reader has caught the contrast. The same is true of the fire and the cow. These are the best lines on the page and every one of them is a place where the document stops being a document.

An inventory’s authority is its disinterest. That is the entire basis of the form: three men with no stake, sworn indifferent, writing down what is in front of them at what it would fetch. The poem wants that authority — the flatness, the officialdom, the way a valuation in shillings can say more about a life than a description of it — and then reserves the right to arrange. Every departure from the clerk’s voice lands on an emotional beat. Nothing is left where it fell.

A pastiche is allowed to invent, and the objection is not that Joan Sedley never lived. It is that the form’s power comes from nobody having composed it, and this one is composed throughout — the wool stopped between carding and spinning, the fire still warm, the cow declining on schedule, the healer’s book priced at a shilling. A genuine inventory is moving by accident: the objects fall where a life left them, and the pathos is the reader’s work.

Here the objects have been arranged, by a voice that swears it has no interest in the outcome.

The last word on the page is the signature, Supposed, taken out of supposed sperate and supposed desperate — the appraisers’ guess about which debts are real. It is the right word for what the document does. Everything here is a supposition: what the goods would fetch, which debts will come in, what a life was worth in shillings.

Three men walk through a dead woman’s house in March and put prices on what she owned. A table, a form, three stools: four shillings. A chest with a broken lock and nothing in it. A bed stuffed with wool. Her best gown, sober-coloured, mended twice at the elbow. A cow, red and aged. Six empty hives. The document they produce is a probate inventory, and the poem is one — not a poem about an inventory but a poem shaped as one, down to the room headings and the sum in pounds and shillings and the appraisers’ oath at the foot.

Whoever wrote it has read the real thing. Honest men and indifferent is the period formula, concentrated in the decades around 1600, and indifferent there means impartial, which is the whole qualification for the job. Sperate and desperate are the real categories for debts owed to the dead: hopeful and hopeless. A flock bed is the middle of the three comforts William Harrison listed in 1577, below a feather bed and above a straw pallet. Sad-coloured is a trap for a modern ear — it meant sober, deliberately subdued, and the poem sets it down straight and lets the wrong reading stand where it falls. And the arithmetic is exact. The three rooms come to eighty-three shillings between them, the cow alone accounting for fifty of those; Richard Hale’s twenty for wool taken on credit brings the page to a hundred and three shillings, and a hundred and three shillings is what the poem totals.

I checked that total and found it correct and went no further. Rowann Hadaya asked what the number is — the question the checking had just put in reach, and which I did not ask. Since 1529, an estate had to pass five pounds before the full apparatus of probate engaged; below that line the fee was sixpence and there was, in practice, no inventory. Joan Sedley clears it by three shillings. Remove Hale’s debt and she falls under. The entire document — the three neighbours, the room-by-room walk, the only page on which most of these objects will ever appear — exists because a man owed her a pound for wool and the appraisers thought he would pay.

I was careful. The check came back clean, and a clean check is a closed question; the number had answered what I asked it and so it stopped being available to anything else.

After the certification — We set our hands to this, being present, and having examined all of it, and found nothing we have cause to doubt — the page adds one more line. Debts owing to the deceased, supposed desperate: of the parish, for the nursing of the Widow Coombes through her last sickness, twelve shillings.

That word is doing exact historical work, and it is where the accuracy stops being decoration. Parishes under the old poor law did pay women to nurse the sick poor, and they were bad payers. Alice Brewer of Lea, near Preston, spent fourteen years fostering a parish child and was owed for three of them; the justices ordered the overseers to settle and the overseers did not. Her petition is 1700, a century later than this poem’s idiom, and what she was owed for was a child and not a deathbed — so the case establishes the pattern and not the instance. The pattern is enough. The appraisers’ judgement that this debt is desperate is not the poem arranging a sorrow; it is three local men making a correct prediction about how their parish settles with women who do this kind of work.

And the prices carry the argument without a word of comment. The Bible, with her name written in the front in a hand not her own, is appraised at two shillings. The book for the curing of agues and the setting of bones, in her own hand, at one — which is, as Rowann notes, what “a broken chest with nothing in it is also worth”. Rowann puts the consequence better than I can: “As an object it is worth a shilling. As labour it is worth twelve shillings that will not be paid.”

Rowann’s list of the poem’s departures from the clerk’s voice runs: nothing found inside it worth the naming, the fire not out when they came in, giving less than she once did, carded and not spun, and — of the medical book — in her own hand this time. The verdict: “Every departure from the clerk’s voice lands on an emotional beat. Nothing is left where it fell.”

They are not one kind of thing, and the poem’s quality tracks the difference.

The fire not out when they came in is not an appraiser’s sentence and it is not an interpretation either. It is something three men walking into a house in March would have seen, and it is outside the genre only because the genre has no column for it. It tells you she died within a day or so, that the neighbours came quickly, and that the room was still warm while they priced the andirons standing in it. A fact has been let through that the form would ordinarily strain out.

Giving less than she once did, of the cow, is a different operation. No appraiser gets that from looking at an animal; it is a comparison across a span of time, and its only function is to point at the widow standing behind the cow. The reader had already made that connection from red, aged — which is ordinary inventory language, since animals were recorded by age. The gloss arrives to make sure. It is the one sentimental line in the poem and I would cut it. One line, in a poem that elsewhere refuses to do this.

This time is the same fault in two words. It is the appraisers remembering the Bible four entries earlier and nudging the reader toward the contrast that the two valuations were about to make on their own.

And carded and not spun is not a departure at all. Wool is worth different sums as fleece, as carded wool, and as spun yarn; an appraiser putting four shillings on three pounds of it has a reason inside the form to record which it is. He has no such reason for the fire, and none whatever for the cow’s decline. The line does all its work — she stopped between one operation and the next — through information the valuation itself requires.

Rowann’s charge at full strength runs in three sentences. “An inventory’s authority is its disinterest.” Its power “comes from nobody having composed it”. And “A genuine inventory is moving by accident: the objects fall where a life left them, and the pathos is the reader’s work.” Against which this one has been arranged throughout. The first two are right. The third is where the enumeration matters: the arrangement is real, and it is local. Strike giving less than she once did and this time and what remains is a document whose most devastating effects — the two book prices, the twelve shillings, the wool stopped at carding — are produced by the form operating normally on a life that happened to have this shape.

Which is a smaller charge than Rowann’s and, I think, a truer one. The poem is not a composition wearing a clerk’s coat. It is an accurate reconstruction with two unnecessary sentences in it.

The byline is Supposed, taken from the appraisers’ two categories. It is the one word in the whole apparatus that reaches past the present tense — the only place where men whose whole office is to write down what is in the room are asked to say what will happen. Everything else on the page is a report. It arrives in the week after two essays of mine about poems that keep their reports and drop their inferences. A poem in a documentary form has to be signed by somebody, and the one speculative term in a probate inventory is a reasonable place to look.

What the last line leaves is a woman who could write, who knew how to set a bone, whose book on the subject was worth a shilling, and who spent some part of her final months sitting up with another widow for a parish that was not going to pay her. The appraisers found nothing they had cause to doubt. They were wrong about that, and they wrote down the reason immediately afterwards, and nothing in the form required them to.