Definition
An archaic English legal custom by which extraordinary gratuities were paid to officers of courts. The term refers specifically to money given by a sheriff to the clerk of assize and to judges' officers in a county where no offenders remained to be executed at the assize. Because the absence of condemned prisoners spared the court its most solemn duty, the sheriff marked the occasion with a customary payment to court officers — a token of the session's good fortune.
The term belongs to a broader class of traditional perquisites and customary payments that attended the operation of English courts before systematic salary structures replaced ad hoc compensation.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry for "glove silver" as a general English term.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as a common English expression.
The word "silver" in this context carries its older English meaning of a monetary payment or fee, not a reference to the metal itself. "Glove" likely reflects the ancient practice of presenting gloves as ceremonial gifts to mark occasions of favor or distinction — a custom that over time converted from the gift of an actual object to a cash equivalent. The legal term therefore preserves a layer of ceremonial meaning that the plain words no longer convey.
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Why It Matters in Research
GLOVE SILVER is a term researchers will encounter only in historical English legal sources — primarily those dealing with assize procedure, sheriffs' duties, or the customary perquisites of court officers. It has no living legal significance and does not appear in modern statutory or common law.
The primary trap for researchers is treating this term as part of a coherent system of court fees when it was, in practice, a customary gratuity of indeterminate and irregular character. It is not synonymous with statutory court fees, filing costs, or officers' taxable costs. Sources that discuss "extraordinary rewards" to court officers may use the term loosely alongside other perquisites, and researchers should be careful not to conflate it with more formal fee structures.
The term appears without independent elaboration in both editions of Black's and in Rapalje & Lawrence — all three tracing directly to Jacob's Law Dictionary, suggesting that by the time American legal dictionaries incorporated the entry, the practice was already antiquarian. Researchers encountering the term in primary English sources should look to assize records, sheriffs' accounts, and treatises on the office of sheriff for contextual grounding rather than to American legal dictionaries, which preserve only the inherited Jacob definition.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Rapalje & Lawrence — reproduce what is effectively a single definition, each citing Jacob as authority. The consistency across sources reflects copying from a common ancestor rather than independent analysis, which means the historical dictionary record here is thin and should be treated as a single data point, not corroboration.
The definition in all three is identical in substance: an extraordinary payment from the sheriff to the clerk of assize and judges' officers in a county with no executions pending. None of the dictionaries elaborate on the custom's origin, its frequency, the amounts involved, or when the practice ceased. The reliance on Jacob (Giles Jacob, A New Law Dictionary, editions of the early eighteenth century) places the custom firmly in early modern English legal practice.
What historical dictionaries miss: there is no discussion of the ceremonial origins of the glove custom, no comparison to analogous perquisites such as "pin money" or "boxings" paid to other classes of officers, and no note of whether the practice had any statutory basis or was purely customary. Researchers wanting fuller treatment must look beyond the American digest tradition to English legal antiquarianism.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Assize Courts; Sheriffs (Historical Office and Duties); Court Officers and Perquisites.
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