Definition
A procedural method used in equity practice for stating and resolving accounts before a court-appointed master. The process worked in two stages: the plaintiff first submitted a written statement called the "charge," setting out the items of account for which he claimed credit; the defendant then responded with a counter-statement called the "discharge," presenting any claims, offsets, or demands he held against the plaintiff. Together these documents defined the scope of the accounting and framed the disputed matters for the master's examination.
The term refers both to the procedure as a whole and to the two constituent documents taken together. In common usage among equity practitioners, "charge and discharge" named the standard accounting format — not a single pleading, but a structured exchange that substituted for formal adversarial pleadings in the context of account-taking.
Common Confusion
"Charge" in this context has nothing to do with a criminal charge or an accusatory instrument. The word here carries its older accounting sense — an entry on the debit side of an account, an amount claimed to be owed. Similarly, "discharge" here does not mean the release of a debtor from liability (as in bankruptcy discharge) or the dismissal of a case. It means a counter-accounting statement: the defendant's written showing of credits, offsets, or competing claims. Researchers encountering these terms in equity records should not import their modern criminal-law or contract-law meanings.
Why It Matters in Research
This is an obsolete procedural form. Charge and discharge belongs to pre-merger equity practice and disappeared from active use when equity and law were fused — in federal courts, under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938; in most states, across roughly the same period. Researchers working in equity records from the colonial era through the late nineteenth century will encounter this terminology regularly in chancery and equity court documents, particularly in partnership accounting disputes, trust accountings, estate matters, and suits for an accounting between co-owners.
The trap: "charge" and "discharge" appear constantly in historical equity records as standalone terms, each carrying their accounting sense. A researcher unfamiliar with the procedure may misread a master's report that refers to "items allowed on the charge" or "credits shown in the discharge" — these are not references to criminal allegations or debt forgiveness but to the specific documents in the accounting proceeding.
Corpus connections are specific: any Law Mind document touching equity practice, masters in chancery, accounting suits, or trust and estate litigation from before the mid-twentieth century may use this terminology. The procedural structure also appears in older treatise discussions of what we now call the accounting remedy — a topic that survived the merger of law and equity even as the specific charge-and-discharge procedure was replaced by discovery and modern accounting formats.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: charge and discharge was the standard equity-practice method for taking accounts before a master. Black's (both editions) and Burrill's describe the same two-document structure — plaintiff's charge followed by defendant's discharge — and characterize it consistently as a former practice, already historical by the time these dictionaries were compiled.
Burrill's entry, while shorter in the surviving excerpt, places the term squarely in "equity practice" and identifies the master as the forum, aligning with both Black's editions. There is no meaningful divergence among the sources on definition or procedure.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the relationship of this procedure to modern accounting discovery, the survival of functional equivalents after procedural merger, or the interpretive challenges these documents pose in archival research. Researchers should not assume that the master's charge-and-discharge format maps cleanly onto contemporary accounting litigation; the documents belong to a procedural world that no longer exists.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia: Discharge — Overview (Methods of Discharge) [contracts_65] — for the distinct legal meaning of discharge in the contract context, useful for disambiguation.