A SECRETIS

Definition

A Secretis (Latin) is a historical title denoting an officer entrusted with the private affairs and secret deliberations of a sovereign or high council. The officer's function was to record, sign, or otherwise give formal effect to orders made in secret council, and to handle matters of state that were not committed to public process. The title was also applied, in earlier usage, to the chancellor, reflecting the chancellor's original role as a keeper of the sovereign's confidential correspondence and seal.

Why It Matters in Research

This term appears almost exclusively in historical and medieval legal sources. Researchers will encounter it in Latin documents, ecclesiastical records, and early constitutional histories of England and continental Europe. Its primary research value is contextual: understanding what an a secretis officer did helps reconstruct administrative hierarchies in pre-modern legal institutions, particularly where records blur the distinction between secretarial, judicial, and chancery functions. The most important trap for corpus researchers is the overlap with related titles. Burrill's entry runs directly into the entry for Ab Actis, and the boundary between these offices — one concerned with secret council matters, the other with public records — is frequently elided in medieval sources. A document referencing an a secretis officer may be describing a function that later evolved into the chancellorship or the office of secretary of state, and anachronistic reading in either direction will distort analysis. Researchers working in ecclesiastical legal history should note that the title was used in both royal and church administrative contexts. The papal curia employed analogous officers under related titles, and confusion between secular and ecclesiastical uses of the term is common in secondary literature.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill draws on Calvinus (Lexicon Juridicum) and Spelman (Glossarium) in defining the officer as one who committed secret council orders to writing and was entrusted with private matters of state, and separately notes the application of the title to the chancellor. This dual reference — to a subordinate recording officer on one hand, and to the chancellor on the other — reflects a genuine historical ambiguity. The chancellor's office grew out of exactly this function: the keeper of secrets became, over time, the keeper of the seal and ultimately a major judicial officer. What Burrill does not elaborate, and what historical dictionaries of this period generally compress, is the institutional development: the a secretis function in the Roman imperial administration, where the title originated, was a distinct secretarial post in the imperial household. In medieval European usage the title migrated into chancery and conciliar contexts with varying meanings. Researchers relying solely on Burrill's entry will have the core meaning but should supplement with specialized glossaries of medieval Latin administrative terms for anything beyond basic identification.

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