Definition
Magister Cancellarie (Latin: "master of the chancery") is a historical term from Old English law denoting a Master in Chancery — an officer appointed to assist the Lord Chancellor in the administration of the Court of Chancery. These officers performed a range of judicial and administrative functions, including examining witnesses, taking accounts, and reporting to the Chancellor on matters referred to them. The title reflects the ecclesiastical character of the early chancery, where such officers were typically drawn from the clergy and held the designation magister as a mark of their priestly or scholarly standing.
Common Confusion
Magister Cancellarie should not be confused with the Lord Chancellor himself, who was the presiding officer of the Court of Chancery and a principal minister of the Crown. The magistri were subordinate officers — assistants and referees — not heads of the court. The term also differs from Clerk of the Chancery, a separate class of officer concerned primarily with the clerical and documentary functions of the court rather than its quasi-judicial business.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources. Researchers working in pre-modern chancery records, Year Books, or treatises on the development of equity jurisdiction will encounter the Latin form; later sources transition uniformly to the anglicized Master in Chancery. The two forms are functionally synonymous, and researchers should search both when canvassing historical materials.
The ecclesiastical character of the office is historically significant. Because the chancery evolved from the royal chapel and secretariat, its officers were typically clergy — hence the magister designation, which carried connotations of academic and priestly rank rather than purely legal qualification. This background explains why early chancery procedure was more flexible and conscience-based than common law procedure: the officers shaping it were trained in canon and civil law, not the common law courts.
Researchers should note that the Masters in Chancery as an institution underwent substantial transformation over centuries. By the nineteenth century, the office had shed its clerical character entirely and operated as a professional judicial auxiliary. The Chancery Procedure Acts and ultimately the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873 restructured or abolished many of these older offices. A term encountered in a sixteenth-century source therefore describes a very different institutional reality than the same office label in an 1850 treatise. Cross-referencing by date is essential when tracing the scope and authority of these officers.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, defining the term as "a master in chancery" under Old English law and noting that these officers "were said to be called magistri, because they were priests." Bouvier cites Burrill and references Whitlock, J., in Latch 133 for the proposition about the clerical origin of the title. This is a compact but reliable entry for the term's basic meaning.
Bouvier's entry, while accurate, is characteristically brief and does not trace the evolution of the office or explain its procedural significance. It identifies the ecclesiastical origin of the title without elaborating on how that origin shaped the court's equity jurisdiction. Researchers should treat Bouvier here as an entry point rather than a complete account. Older English legal dictionaries — particularly Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary — provide somewhat fuller treatment of the Masters in Chancery as an institution, though still without the jurisdictional and procedural depth available in chancery-specific treatises.
No significant divergence exists among historical dictionaries on the core definition; the disagreement, to the extent it exists, is one of completeness rather than substance.
Jurisdictional Note
Magister Cancellarie is an exclusively English legal term with no direct American counterpart. Some American states maintained equity courts with functionally analogous referee or master positions, but these were organized under different labels and independent statutory frameworks. American researchers encountering the Latin term in historical sources should understand it as referring specifically to English chancery practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: CHANCERY; MASTERS IN CHANCERY; EQUITY JURISDICTION