Definition
An archaic spelling variant of "clerk," used in early English legal texts and closely tracking the Latin *clericus*. The term carries no independent legal meaning distinct from clerk; it is simply an older orthographic form that a researcher may encounter in historical documents, pleadings, and reports.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "cleric."
Historical common usage: Not separately defined in Webster's 1913; the term had already fallen out of common use before that period.
Editorial note: The common meaning of the cognate "cleric" points toward a member of the clergy, while the legal meaning of "clerk" — and by extension "clerick" — historically encompassed both ecclesiastical and secular administrative functions. The overlap is not accidental: literate court and administrative officers in medieval England were predominantly clergymen, so the same Latin root, *clericus*, served both meanings. A researcher encountering "clerick" in an early English legal source should not assume an exclusively ecclesiastical reference.
Common Confusion
"Clerick," "cleric," and "clerk" are easily conflated, particularly in early printed and manuscript sources where spelling was unstandardized. In modern usage these have diverged sharply: "cleric" denotes a member of the clergy; "clerk" denotes a court or administrative officer or a junior legal professional. In the period when "clerick" appeared, the two functions frequently coincided in the same person, and historical legal texts do not always draw a clean line between them. Researchers should read the surrounding context to determine whether an ecclesiastical or secular role is intended.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is recognition: a researcher working through early English reports, Year Books, or pre-eighteenth-century pleadings may encounter "clerick" and need to know it is not a term of art distinct from "clerk." The Burrill citation to 2 Show. 386 (Shower's King's Bench Reports, a late-seventeenth-century English reporter) confirms the form was still appearing in legal argument in that period.
Spelling instability is a significant indexing trap in the Law Mind corpus for any term derived from *clericus*. Variant forms — clerick, clerke, clark, clericus — may not be captured by a single search string. When surveying historical sources for material about court clerks, officers of the court, or ecclesiastical personnel, researchers should run searches on multiple spelling variants.
The term also illustrates a broader pattern: Latin legal vocabulary was anglicized inconsistently across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, producing variant forms that appear in reports and treatises without standardization. Burrill's note that "clerick" closely follows the Latin is a useful anchor for tracing the term back to its source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats "clerick" briefly and correctly: it is an old form of clerk, with the single supporting citation to Shower's Reports. Burrill does not develop the term independently, which is appropriate given that the term has no distinct legal meaning. No other shelf source in the Law Mind corpus provides a separate entry. The absence of the term from later dictionaries — including Black's — confirms that "clerick" had ceased to appear in legal usage by the nineteenth century and was absorbed entirely into the standard spelling "clerk."