Definition
Latin. "Auditors of account." A medieval English legal office designating officials appointed to hear, examine, and settle accounts — particularly the accounts of receivers, bailiffs, and other agents who held or administered property or revenue on behalf of another. The term appears in the statutes and legal literature of late thirteenth-century England as a recognized procedural role in the resolution of financial disputes between lords and their accountants.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow term of medieval English administrative and estate law. Researchers will encounter it primarily in sources touching on the manorial system, feudal estate administration, and the early history of the action of account (the common law writ by which a principal compelled a receiver or bailiff to render an accounting). The term marks a procedural stage: once a defendant was found liable to account in the action of account, the matter was referred to auditors — auditores compoti — who would hear the detailed financial reckoning.
Researchers working in early common law materials should note that the action of account is the doctrinal ancestor of modern accounting and fiduciary accounting remedies. The office of auditor described here is not a statutory auditor in the modern corporate or governmental sense, and conflating the two will produce serious anachronism. The procedural mechanism — court-ordered reference of accounts to designated auditors — reappears in equity practice and has distant structural parallels to the modern reference to a master or special master, but the institutional context is entirely different.
The term appears in two distinct but closely related forms in Fleta: auditores compoti (auditors of account, singular account) and auditores compotorum (auditors of accounts, plural). This grammatical variation reflects nothing more than whether a single account or multiple accounts are at issue. Both forms point to the same office and should be treated as synonymous for research purposes.
Because the primary sources here are Statute of Westminster II (1285) and Fleta (circa 1290), researchers relying on later digests or abridgments should verify whether the term is being used descriptively of medieval practice or analytically in a later author's own framework. Fleta in particular is a treatise heavily dependent on Bracton, and passages on auditors of account should be read alongside Bracton's treatment of the writ of account for full context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core reference, citing Statute of Westminster II, chapter 11, and Fleta, book 2, chapters 70 and 88. The entry is brief and purely definitional, offering no analysis of the procedural role or the broader action of account framework. Burrill correctly identifies the term as belonging to "old English law," signaling to the reader that the term had no living application in nineteenth-century American or English practice at the time of his writing.
The Fleta citations are worth noting for researchers: book 2, chapter 70 addresses the duties of receivers and the rendering of accounts in manorial administration, while chapter 88 addresses related accounting obligations. The dual citation reflects that auditores compoti functioned across both estate management and the more formal legal proceeding to compel account.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus covers this term. Its absence from Bouvier, Black, and similar American sources is itself informative: the term had effectively passed out of operative use by the time American legal dictionaries were being compiled, surviving only as a term of historical or antiquarian interest.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to medieval English law and has no direct American counterpart. It belongs to the era before equity absorbed the action of account, and researchers working in American jurisdictions will find no operative use of the term in domestic sources.