Definition
In English legal history, the Hamper (also rendered Hanaper or Clerk of the Hamper) was an officer on the common law side of the Court of Chancery responsible for registering fines paid upon the issuance of writs and ensuring that sealed writs were properly collected and stored for subsequent issue. The name derives from the literal basket or hamper in which writs and their returns were originally kept. The office was abolished by statute in 1852, with its duties transferred to the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A large basket, usually with a cover, used for packing and carrying articles or small animals; a laundry basket; a gift basket.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A large basket, usually with a cover, used for the packing and carrying of articles; as, a hamper of wine; a clothes hamper; an oyster hamper, which contains two bushels."
The legal meaning is entirely derived from the common one — the office took its name from the physical basket actually used to store chancery writs. A researcher encountering "hamper" in a legal source should not read it as the common noun but as a reference to a specific court officer or administrative function. The etymological link is genuine and historically transparent, but the legal usage is a technical term of art referring to the officer and office, not the container.
Why It Matters in Research
The principal research trap here is terminological: sources from the pre-1852 Court of Chancery practice may reference the Hamper, the Hanaper, or the Clerk of the Hanaper interchangeably, and older documents occasionally spell the term in varied forms (hanaper, hamper, hanapier). Researchers working in chancery records, writs, or early English procedural history need to recognize all variants as pointing to the same office.
The 1852 abolition is a hard chronological boundary. Any reference to the Hamper as an active officer post-dates this point only in historical retrospect. Documents or treatises citing the Hamper in a present-tense operational sense can generally be dated to before 1852.
This term also connects to the broader administrative structure of the Court of Chancery, which maintained a complex array of officers — Masters in Chancery, the Six Clerks, the Clerk of the Crown — many of which were similarly reorganized or abolished during the mid-nineteenth-century reform period. Researchers encountering the Hamper will likely need to map the surrounding officer structure to understand the procedural context of any document in hand.
The Hanaper Office also had a revenue function: fines registered by the Hamper represented fees paid to the Crown on writs, making this officer relevant not only to procedural history but to fiscal administration of the early common law courts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the primary source for this term in American legal reference literature, and its treatment is concise but accurate. Bouvier correctly identifies the officer, the court, the functional duties (registering fines, overseeing sealed writs), the physical origin of the name, and the 1852 abolition. No meaningful divergence exists among historical sources on these basic facts — the historical record is settled.
What historical dictionaries tend not to address is the revenue significance of the Hamper's role, or how the office fit into the broader wave of Chancery reforms that included the Chancery Procedure Act 1852 and related legislation. Researchers needing that context must look beyond legal dictionaries to administrative and legal history sources dealing with the reform of the English court system in the Victorian era.
Jurisdictional Note
The Hamper was exclusively an office of the English Court of Chancery and has no American counterpart or parallel development. American legal dictionaries include it for historical reference purposes only. It is irrelevant to U.S. state or federal court research except as background for understanding English procedural sources upon which American equity practice was originally modeled.