Definition
The Hanaper Office was a defunct administrative department within the English Court of Chancery, located on the common law side of that court. It functioned as the office responsible for receiving, processing, and collecting fees on writs and other instruments passing through Chancery. The office was presided over by a Clerk of the Hanaper, who accounted for fees paid upon the sealing of royal grants, patents, and writs issued under the Great Seal. The Hanaper Office was abolished in the nineteenth century as part of broad reforms to the English court system.
The name derives from the Latin *hanaiperium* (hamper or basket), though the precise function of that basket has been disputed. The office is of antiquarian interest only in modern legal research; no equivalent institution survives in contemporary practice.
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Common Confusion
The Hanaper Office is sometimes loosely grouped with the Petty Bag Office, another Chancery administrative department. The two were distinct: the Petty Bag Office handled returns of writs, certain Crown proceedings, and enrollment of attorneys, while the Hanaper Office was specifically concerned with the receipt of fees on sealed instruments. Researchers encountering references to either office in historical records should not assume their functions were interchangeable.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical sources dealing with English Chancery practice before the mid-nineteenth century reforms. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in the following contexts:
**Chancery practice materials.** Pre-reform treatises and procedural guides describing the administrative machinery of Chancery will reference the Hanaper Office when discussing how writs were issued and what fees attended them. Understanding that this was a fee-collection and writ-processing function helps decode otherwise opaque procedural references.
**Patent and grant histories.** Because royal patents, grants of office, and certain Crown instruments passed through the Hanaper and attracted fees payable there, records touching on the grant of privileges or monopolies in early modern England may reference Hanaper fees or the Clerk of the Hanaper. This is particularly relevant for research into Crown appointments, colonial charters, or the history of specific patents.
**Reform-era materials.** The nineteenth-century abolition of the Hanaper Office is part of the broader story of English court reform culminating in the Judicature Acts. Materials from this period sometimes use the Hanaper Office as an example of sinecure-ridden administrative redundancy. Researchers tracing the institutional history of Chancery or the history of court fees will find it cited in reform debates and commission reports.
**Traps in historical sources.** Older sources vary in how they describe the office's scope. Some treat it as encompassing all sealed instruments passing through Chancery; others describe it more narrowly. The fees structure associated with the Hanaper was layered and changed over time, so cost figures cited in different periods are not comparable.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the foundational description: the Hanaper Office sat on the common law side of Chancery and handled writs, and its name reflects the hamper (*hanaiperium*) associated with the office. Burrill follows Blackstone's explanation that writs were originally stored in a hamper, giving the office its name. However, Burrill also records Spelman's competing view — that the hamper was used for keeping fees or money rather than papers. This is a minor but telling historiographical point: the name preserves a physical object whose function was contested even by early legal antiquarians.
Blackstone's account, cited by Burrill, reflects the common antiquarian tendency to romanticize early institutional arrangements as charmingly simple. Spelman's correction is the more plausible administrative history — fee collection was the office's operative function, and the hamper was a strongbox or coffer, not a filing system. Researchers should treat Blackstone's gloss as a narrative convenience rather than documentary history.
No modern legal dictionary includes the Hanaper Office as a live term, and rightly so. Its presence in Burrill and in older editions of English legal dictionaries reflects the period when institutional memory of pre-reform Chancery still had practical relevance for practitioners reading older authorities.
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Jurisdictional Note
The Hanaper Office was exclusively an English institution with no direct American counterpart. Colonial legal materials occasionally reference Chancery practice in terms borrowed from English sources, but the Hanaper Office as such had no presence in American courts. Researchers working in American legal history should treat any reference to it as a citation to English practice.
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