Definition
Chancers were officers of the English court system formerly responsible for taxing, that is, formally reviewing and calculating, costs awarded in legal proceedings. The role was administrative in nature, ensuring that the costs claimed by a successful party were properly assessed and reduced to an official figure before enforcement or payment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "chancer" — informal British and Irish English for a person who takes risks or tries their luck; someone who attempts to gain advantage through opportunism rather than merit.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not record "chancer" or "chancers" as a common English word, suggesting the colloquial sense developed largely in the twentieth century.
Editorial note: The gap here is significant and potentially misleading. A researcher encountering "chancers" in a modern British or Irish text will almost certainly read it as an informal term for opportunists. In historical legal sources, it is a term of art for court officers performing a defined procedural function. The two meanings share no connection beyond spelling.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English legal history, particularly in records predating the consolidation and reform of court administration in the nineteenth century, may encounter "chancers" in procedural documents, fee schedules, court rolls, or correspondence relating to costs. The term is functional and institutional, not descriptive of character.
The principal trap is anachronism running in both directions. A modern researcher may dismiss the word as colloquial British slang and overlook its technical significance. Conversely, a researcher working in twentieth-century British or Irish materials should not assume they are reading about court officers when the context is plainly informal.
Because Bouvier's flags this as English (rather than American) usage, researchers should not expect to find the term operating in the same way in American colonial or post-independence legal records. American court systems developed their own vocabulary and officer designations for cost taxation, and "chancers" does not appear to have migrated into American legal usage as a recognized term of art.
The scarcity of secondary commentary on this term means that primary source work — fee tables, court orders, procedural manuals of English courts — will be more productive than searching legal treatises. Researchers tracing the history of cost taxation in English procedure more broadly will find the term embedded in that larger institutional story rather than standing as a subject of its own dedicated literature.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's sole entry is spare: "Formerly those who taxed costs. English." The brevity is itself informative. Bouvier includes the term as a matter of completeness for practitioners who might encounter it in English authorities, not as a living term of American practice. The qualifier "formerly" signals that even by Bouvier's time the term had passed out of active use, placing its active period in English legal administration well before the mid-nineteenth century.
No competing or supplementary definitions from other historical legal dictionaries are available in the source material, and the term does not appear to have attracted extended treatment in major treatises. Historical sources are silent on nuance — whether chancers were attached to specific courts, what their relationship was to masters or taxing masters, or how the role evolved before disappearing. Researchers needing that granularity will need to go beyond the dictionary literature.
Jurisdictional Note
This is an English legal term with no documented equivalent function under that name in American jurisdictions. The underlying function — judicial or quasi-judicial review and calculation of awarded costs — exists in various forms across common law systems, but the officer title "chancer" is specific to English historical practice.