Definition
An officer formerly attached to the king's mint in England, whose primary duty was to exchange coined money for bullion brought in by merchants, goldsmiths, and others. The changer served as the official interface between the private bullion trade and the royal coining apparatus, facilitating the conversion of raw precious metal into lawful currency under crown authority. The office was a creature of English monetary administration and does not have a direct counterpart in modern legal systems.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone or something that changes things; a moneychanger; a person employed in changing or discounting money.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who changes or alters the form of anything; one who deals in or changes money; one apt to change — an inconstant person.
The ordinary sense of "changer" as anyone who exchanges money is broad and informal. The legal term is considerably narrower: it designates a specific royal officer operating within the mint system, not a private money dealer or broker. Private moneychangers were a separate class of traders subject to their own regulations; conflating them with the changer of the mint misreads the structure of historical English monetary law.
Common Confusion
Burrill's entry appends a second, unrelated meaning: the Law French verb chaunter (to declare aloud, to pronounce as a jury's verdict), cross-referenced under CHANTER/Chaunter. The proximity of these entries in Burrill's creates a potential confusion between the noun changer (the mint officer) and the verb chaunter (to find or declare a verdict). These are etymologically and functionally distinct. Researchers encountering "chaungeour" or variant spellings in early sources should confirm from context whether the reference is to the mint office or to the act of pronouncing a finding.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively obsolete as a live legal concept but appears in English statutory and administrative sources from the medieval and early modern periods. Several points matter for corpus navigation:
Spelling variation is significant. Historical sources render the term as chaungeour, chaungeur, chaungour, and similar forms following Anglo-Norman orthographic conventions. A search limited to "changer" will miss many primary source appearances. Burrill explicitly notes the spelling chaungeour from the statute 2 Hen. VI, c. 12, which is the key statutory reference point.
The office was a royal, not a private, one. Researchers tracing the history of currency regulation, mint administration, or crown monopolies over coinage should treat the changer as part of the apparatus of royal prerogative over money — distinct from the broader category of private moneychangers, who were separately regulated and periodically suppressed or licensed.
Cross-period searching requires care. After the restructuring of the English mint in the early modern period, the specific office of changer disappears from administrative records, but the vocabulary persists in legal commentary and dictionaries as a historical reference. Finding the term in a post-Tudor source is almost certainly a citation back to earlier law, not evidence of a functioning office.
The Burrill dual entry (mint officer / Law French verb) means that a researcher using Burrill as a source must read the full entry carefully — the two definitions run together without strong visual separation in the original text.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: an officer of the English royal mint responsible for exchanging coin for bullion. The entries in Black's (1st and 2nd editions) are nearly identical and terse. Burrill's is the richest, adding the statutory citation to 2 Hen. VI, c. 12 and the spelling variant chaungeour, and citing Cowell and Blount — two standard authorities on obsolete English legal offices. Burrill then appends the Law French chaunter entry, which Black's omits entirely.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: none explains the practical operation of the office in detail, the fees or rates involved, or how the changer related to other mint officers such as the master, assayer, or warden. Researchers needing functional context beyond the bare definition will need to look beyond dictionary sources to mint records, exchequer documents, and administrative histories of the English coinage.
Jurisdictional Note
The office of changer is specific to the English royal mint and has no recognized equivalent in Scots, Irish, or colonial American legal systems. References to the term in non-English legal sources should be treated as borrowings or analogical uses rather than evidence of a parallel institution.