Definition
In old English law, advocates, pleaders, or countors who appeared before the Court of Common Pleas. The term denotes a class of professional legal speakers or narrators who were attached specifically to the common law bench (bancus) and whose function was to plead on behalf of parties in that court. They were also called serjeant countors, a designation reflecting both their professional rank and their role as oral advocates. The term is Latin in form and historical in application, with no modern legal meaning.
Common Confusion
BANCI NARRATORES should not be confused with NARRATORES generally. The broader term narratores referred to pleaders or advocates across various courts, while banci narratores was the specific designation for those attached to the Common Pleas bench. The prefix banci (of the bench) is the operative distinction. Researchers encountering either term in old English sources should note the court-specific reference embedded in the full form.
Why It Matters in Research
This term surfaces almost exclusively in historical English legal sources and carries no operative legal meaning in any modern jurisdiction. Researchers will encounter it in glossaries, commentaries on the common law courts, and historical treatises on the English legal profession, particularly those tracing the development of the serjeants-at-law and the organization of advocacy before the common pleas.
The key navigational point is the relationship between BANCI NARRATORES and the Court of Common Pleas specifically. Medieval and early modern English courts had distinct professional communities of pleaders, and the term is a marker of that institutional differentiation. Sources that use it without qualification are almost certainly referring to Common Pleas practice, not Chancery, King's Bench, or Exchequer.
Blackstone's Commentaries (1 Bl. Comm. 24) is the anchor citation for this term across all five source dictionaries, which suggests the secondary legal dictionaries are largely derivative of that single passage. Researchers seeking fuller context should go to Blackstone directly rather than treating the dictionary entries as independent sources. Cowell's Interpreter, also cited in multiple entries, provides an earlier gloss and may offer terminological nuance that Blackstone's compressed reference omits.
The Burrill entry is the most analytically useful of the five, introducing the phrase "placitantium ad—" (apparently truncated in the source), which would have identified these figures as advocates of the plea. That fragment points toward a richer descriptive tradition that later dictionaries compressed into the bare synonyms advocates, countors, serjeants.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries agree on the core definition: advocates or countors attached to the Common Pleas. The variation among them is almost entirely one of compression rather than substantive disagreement. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier offer virtually identical language, both tracing to Blackstone and Cowell. Rapalje & Lawrence adds the phrase "countors of the bench," which is slightly more precise in conveying the bench-specific nature of the role. Burrill's is the most technically descriptive, using the Latin "Countors of the Bench" and hinting at a fuller characterization of their pleading function before the text breaks off.
None of the historical entries situate the term within the broader evolution of the English legal profession — the eventual displacement of countors by barristers, the decline of the serjeants-at-law, or the abolition of the Court of Common Pleas itself in 1873. For a researcher working in nineteenth-century sources, this context is largely invisible in the dictionary entries and must be reconstructed from elsewhere.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no application outside the historical English common law tradition. It does not appear in American, Scottish, or colonial legal usage as a technical term of art. Researchers in American historical sources who encounter it are likely reading a treatise that is itself drawing on English common law history.