Definition
An arcarius was a treasurer or keeper of public money in civil (Roman) and old English law. The term designated an official responsible for the custody of public funds, typically held in a chest or treasury. The role was administrative rather than judicial — the arcarius maintained and safeguarded money rather than adjudicating its disposition.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with Roman law or early medieval English legal administration. Researchers encountering arcarius in primary sources should understand it as a positional title, not a legal doctrine or cause of action. Its presence in a text is a reliable signal that the surrounding material draws from Roman civil law tradition or Anglo-Saxon and early Norman administrative records.
The term is unlikely to appear in common law case reports from the mature common law period (post-Magna Carta) in any operative legal sense. If encountered in later English legal writing, it will typically be as a historical reference or learned gloss rather than as a term with live legal effect. Researchers using Law Mind's corpus should not treat arcarius as interchangeable with modern fiduciary titles such as treasurer, receiver, or custodian — those carry distinct legal duties and liabilities developed under equity and statute that arcarius does not imply.
One indexing trap: Rapalje & Lawrence's entry for arcarius runs directly into unrelated material on "Award" without clear separation, a formatting artifact common in older dictionary compilations. Researchers consulting that source should take care not to conflate the two entries.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree entirely on substance: arcarius means a treasurer or keeper of public money. All cite the same authority — the Codex Justinianus (Cod. 10, 70, 15) and Spelman's Glossarium — indicating the definition was transmitted without independent development across these works. None of the dictionaries elaborate on the duties, powers, or legal accountability of the arcarius beyond bare custodial function.
Burrill adds the most linguistically useful note, tracing the term to arca (a chest), which situates arcarius within the Roman practice of physically securing public funds in strongboxes under official custody. This etymology is editorially absent from the Black's entries but helps confirm that the role was fundamentally one of physical custody rather than financial management in any modern sense.
Black's 2nd edition appends the cryptic notation "State secrets. 1" to the entry — likely a cross-reference artifact from that edition's indexing system, not a substantive legal connection. Researchers should disregard it as editorial noise.
None of the source dictionaries address how the role interacted with other officers of the Roman or early English fiscal system, nor do they trace whether any English common law equivalent absorbed or displaced the function. That silence is itself informative: the term did not generate English case law, and the dictionaries reflect its purely historical character.