Definition
The Lord Keeper, formally the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, was a high officer of the English Crown entrusted with physical custody of the Great Seal of England and charged with exercising, in whole or in part, the judicial and administrative functions associated with that seal. In practice, the Lord Keeper was at various times in English history either a separate officer from the Lord Chancellor or an alternative title for the same person performing the same role.
By statute — 5 Elizabeth I, c. 18 — the offices of Lord Chancellor and Lord Keeper were declared to be one and the same in law, carrying identical powers, dignity, and responsibility. After that enactment, whether a holder of the Great Seal was styled "Lord Chancellor" or "Lord Keeper" was a matter of title and royal preference, not a difference in legal authority. From 1760 onward, the title Lord Keeper effectively fell out of use, and the office has since been held under the designation Lord Chancellor exclusively.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English legal history before 1760 must be alert to the fact that Great Seal instruments and judicial acts may be attributed to a Lord Keeper rather than a Lord Chancellor. The two titles do not signal different institutions or different legal powers after 1559 — they signal the same office with a different label. Conflating pre- and post-statutory usage, or treating the Lord Keeper as a subordinate officer rather than a co-equal title holder, will produce errors in tracing the authority behind particular acts, writs, or Chancery decisions.
Before Henry II's reign, the keeper of the seal was an administrative functionary rather than a great officer of state. The elevation of the office and the periodic splitting of the titles in the medieval period means that early sources — especially chronicle sources or administrative records predating the Elizabethan statute — require careful attention to which functions were actually being exercised and by whom. Do not assume the pre-statutory Lord Keeper held the full Chancellorship.
Because the Elizabethan statute merged the two offices in law while leaving the choice of title open, case law and Chancery practice from the sixteenth through mid-eighteenth century will reference both titles without distinction. Searches limited to "Lord Chancellor" will miss materials generated under Lord Keepers, and vice versa.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is concise but accurate on the essential points. It correctly identifies the 5 Elizabeth I, c. 18 statute as the operative merger and notes the 1760 cutoff after which the Lord Keeper title was no longer used. Bouvier traces the divergence of the two offices to the period after Henry II, which aligns with the broader historical record of royal administration.
What Bouvier's entry does not address is the political significance of the title distinction during the intervening centuries. The appointment of a Lord Keeper rather than a Lord Chancellor was sometimes a deliberate royal choice reflecting the political sensitivity of the position — a Lord Keeper could be seen as a more provisional or less formally elevated appointment, useful during periods of political uncertainty or transition. This nuance does not affect the legal equivalence established by statute, but it is relevant to understanding why the distinction persisted in practice long after it ceased to have legal meaning.
Historical dictionaries generally agree that the statutory merger under Elizabeth I is the governing legal fact, and that post-1760 the title became entirely historical. No significant divergence among sources on the core legal point.
Jurisdictional Note
The Lord Keeper is an institution of English law with no counterpart in other common law jurisdictions. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or colonial legal materials should not assume the title or the office traveled with the common law into those systems.