Definition
A Latin term meaning "moreover" or "over and above." In historical English law, *insuper* was an exchequer term designating a charge entered against a person in their account — typically an additional or surplus amount found owing upon audit of that account. The term described the moment in exchequer procedure when an accountant, having failed to balance their account or having been found to owe more than previously recorded, was charged with the excess. That excess charge itself was sometimes called the *insuper*.
Common Confusion
INSUPER should not be confused with its use as an ordinary Latin adverb (meaning simply "moreover" or "furthermore") in non-technical legal writing. When encountered in a judicial opinion or pleading as a transitional word introducing an additional point, it carries no technical exchequer meaning. The technical charge-related meaning applies specifically in the context of account audits before the Court of Exchequer.
Why It Matters in Research
INSUPER is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in historical exchequer records, treatises on English fiscal administration, and glossaries appended to early legal dictionaries. It belongs to the specialized vocabulary of the Court of Exchequer and its accounting procedures — a procedural world largely extinct by the time modern legal dictionaries were consolidated.
The key research trap: because *insuper* appears as a term of art in exchequer accounts, it may surface in archival documents, plea rolls, and pipe rolls without explanation. Researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century English fiscal records should recognize that the word signals an accounting charge against a debtor to the Crown, not a substantive legal doctrine or cause of action.
The term has no meaningful American legal history. It did not migrate into colonial or early republic practice in any documented technical sense, and researchers working in American sources will not encounter it as a live term. Its appearance in American legal dictionaries (Black's, Bouvier's) is purely for completeness and historical reference.
All four source dictionaries cite Blount — Thomas Blount's *Nomo-Lexikon: A Law-Dictionary* (1670) — as authority. This is the intellectual chain: Blount preserved the term from exchequer practice, and subsequent compilers copied it forward. The definition has not evolved or been contested; it has simply been transmitted unchanged across three centuries of legal lexicography.
Researchers tracing exchequer procedure more broadly should move from *insuper* to related terms governing the audit and charging functions of the Court of Exchequer, particularly *quietus est* (the formal discharge given when an account was settled) and *charge* in its exchequer sense.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in complete agreement — word for word in most cases — and all trace authority to Blount. This uniformity reflects the term's status as a received historical artifact rather than a living legal concept under active interpretation.
Black's 1st and 2nd editions, Burrill, and Bouvier each define *insuper* as "moreover; over and above," identify it as "an old exchequer term," and describe its application to a charge made upon a person in their account. No source adds substantive analysis or case law. The consistency is itself informative: this is a term that had passed out of active legal use by the time these dictionaries were compiled, preserved for the benefit of readers encountering it in older authorities.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any procedural context explaining *how* the insuper charge was recorded, challenged, or resolved in exchequer practice. For that, researchers must go beyond the dictionaries to primary sources and treatises on the Court of Exchequer itself.