Definition
In old English law, an executor of a last will and testament. The term is a Latin-derived word drawn from medieval ecclesiastical and legal Latin, used in older English legal instruments and records to denote the person appointed to carry out the provisions of a deceased's will. Both principal historical dictionaries trace the term directly to Cowell's legal glossary and offer no independent elaboration beyond this core meaning.
Common Confusion
Do not conflate *economicus* with *oeconomus*, a closely related term appearing in some medieval Latin sources to denote a manager, steward, or administrator of a household or estate — a role that overlaps conceptually with executor but is not identical. The shared Latin root (*oeconomia*, from the Greek for household management) explains the lexical proximity, but the legal office of executor is the specific referent of *economicus* in English legal usage as glossed by Cowell and the dictionaries that follow him.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal records — ecclesiastical court filings, probate instruments, and Latin-language legal manuscripts predating the standardization of English legal terminology. Researchers encountering *economicus* in a historical source should treat it as functionally synonymous with "executor" in the modern sense, but should remain alert to the ecclesiastical context in which the term was most commonly deployed. Medieval ecclesiastical courts exercised broad jurisdiction over probate and testamentary matters in England, and Latin terminology dominated those records well into the early modern period.
The chief research trap is assuming this term carries any distinct or specialized meaning beyond executor. It does not. It is a Latinate label for an ordinary legal office, not a term of art distinguishing a particular species of executor from others. A researcher who encounters *economicus* and searches only modern probate indexes or Black's Law Dictionary cross-references under "executor" may miss it entirely; the connection runs through historical Latin glossaries, particularly Cowell.
Note also that this term has no living presence in modern Anglo-American legal usage. It is a dead term — encountered only in historical sources and the dictionaries that glossed those sources. Researchers working in colonial American probate records, early common law manuscripts, or ecclesiastical court archives are the most likely to encounter it in practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement, and both openly acknowledge their dependence on a single upstream source: John Cowell's *The Interpreter* (1607), a foundational glossary of law terms used in English legal practice. Neither dictionary adds analysis beyond the single-sentence gloss. This convergence is itself informative — it confirms the term was never widely litigated or disputed, and never developed interpretive layers beyond its basic meaning.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the practical context in which *economicus* appears in the primary sources. Cowell's own entry, on which both rely, is similarly spare. Researchers seeking fuller treatment of how executors functioned in ecclesiastical probate practice will need to look beyond the dictionary shelf to treatises on ecclesiastical law and probate history, such as Henry Swinburne's *A Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills* (1590), which addresses executor duties extensively in the period when this Latin terminology was still in active use.