Definition
A cellerarius was the officer in a medieval monastery responsible for provisioning and managing the domestic stores — food, drink, and household supplies — of the religious house. The role was essentially that of chief steward or butler, with responsibility for the cellars and stores from which the community was sustained. In university settings, the equivalent officer was known as a manciple or caterer, responsible for supplying provisions to the college or hall.
The term appears in English legal and ecclesiastical records primarily in connection with monastic administration, property transactions, and ecclesiastical governance. A cellerarius could act in an institutional capacity, signing documents or appearing in legal proceedings on behalf of the monastic house in matters relating to provisioning and domestic affairs.
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Common Confusion
The cellerarius is sometimes loosely treated as synonymous with the monastic bursar or treasurer. These were distinct offices. The bursar (or bursarius) held financial and accounting responsibilities for the house as a whole, while the cellerarius was specifically concerned with the physical management of provisions and stores. In large monasteries, both offices coexisted. Researchers encountering either title in historical records should not assume interchangeability.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical and ecclesiastical legal records — monastic charters, visitation documents, ecclesiastical court proceedings, and records of dissolved religious houses. Researchers working in English legal history, particularly materials from the pre-Reformation period or records generated by the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, may encounter cellerarius as a party, signatory, or officer named in conveyances, leases, and grants of monastic lands.
The practical significance is institutional identification: knowing that a cellerarius is a domestic officer rather than a head of house or financial officer helps researchers correctly situate a document's signatories and assess what authority that individual would have had to bind the house in a given transaction.
Because the office was abolished along with the monasteries in England during the sixteenth century, the term has no living legal application in English or American law. It survives in legal dictionaries largely as a tool for interpreting historical instruments.
The parallel to the university manciple noted in both Black's editions is a useful navigational bridge: researchers working with medieval or early modern university records who encounter "manciple" or "caterer" in an institutional provisioning context are looking at a functional equivalent, and cross-referencing definitions of those terms may be productive.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary give identical, terse definitions: a butler in a monastery, with the note that universities used the terms manciple or caterer for the equivalent role. The definition is accurate as far as it goes but reflects the brevity typical of historical legal dictionaries when handling terms with no active doctrinal significance. Neither edition elaborates on the legal capacity of a cellerarius to act on behalf of a monastic institution, the scope of authority the office carried, or the broader monastic administrative hierarchy in which the role sat.
Neither edition flags the distinction between the cellerarius and the bursar, which is the most practically important disambiguation for a legal researcher working with period documents. Researchers should treat both editions as an entry point, not a complete account of the term's institutional context.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term has no application in modern Anglo-American law. It is relevant exclusively in historical English ecclesiastical and property law, and to a lesser extent in records of continental European religious institutions that intersect with English legal history.
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