Definition
Clicus (also rendered cl'icus) is a contracted or abbreviated form of the Latin term clericus, meaning a cleric or clerk, appearing in old legal pleadings and records. The abbreviation was a scribal shorthand convention used in medieval and early modern legal manuscripts to denote a person in clerical orders or, in its broader legal sense, a clerk of a court or legal proceeding.
Common Confusion
Researchers should not conflate clicus with clericus as a substantive legal status. The abbreviation itself has no independent legal meaning; it is a scribal convention pointing back to clericus, which in turn carried significant legal weight depending on context. The word clericus itself split over time into the ecclesiastical and the administrative-legal meanings, and corpus sources will reflect both. A plea record naming a party as cl'icus may be invoking benefit of clergy as a defense; a procedural record may simply be identifying a court officer. Treating the abbreviation as self-explanatory risks misidentifying the legal significance of the underlying term.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is paleographic: a researcher working through manuscript pleadings, plea rolls, or early printed law reports may encounter cl'icus or similar contractions and need to resolve the abbreviation before interpreting the surrounding text. Misreading or failing to expand the contraction can obscure whether a party or officer is identified as a cleric (with attendant privileges such as benefit of clergy) or as a court clerk (a procedural officer). The apostrophe or superscript mark in cl'icus signals a deliberate omission of internal letters, a standard feature of medieval Latin legal writing. Researchers should note that the same contracted form could appear in records across centuries and jurisdictions without change, meaning the surrounding procedural and substantive context is essential to determining which sense of clericus is intended.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies clicus simply as a contraction of clericus used in old pleadings and records, citing 1 Instr. Cler. 9. The entry is brief by design: Burrill treats this as a scribal form rather than a substantive legal concept, and that treatment is correct. The historical dictionaries do not disagree on this point because there is nothing to disagree about — this is a matter of Latin abbreviation practice rather than doctrine. What the historical sources do not supply is guidance on distinguishing the two principal meanings carried by the underlying term clericus in English legal history: the ecclesiastical cleric and the secular court clerk. Both senses were live in medieval pleading, and the contracted form served both without differentiation.