Definition
A Master at Common Law was an officer of the English superior courts of common law — principally the courts of King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer — responsible for a range of ministerial and administrative functions essential to the operation of those courts. Each of the three superior courts had five such officers.
Their duties fell into two categories. When attending court, Masters at Common Law took affidavits sworn before the court, administered oaths to attorneys upon their admission to practice, and certified to the court — in cases of doubt or procedural difficulty — what the established practice of the court required. Out of court, their principal work involved taxing attorneys' costs (that is, reviewing and approving the fees and disbursements attorneys sought to recover from opposing parties), superintending the issue of writs, managing the formal procedural steps in an action, and receiving and accounting for fees and moneys paid into court.
The office was a creature of English common law courts specifically. It is distinct from the office of Master in Chancery, which belonged to the equity side of the English court system, and from the modern court-appointed special master used in American federal and state practice.
Common Confusion
MASTER AT COMMON LAW vs. MASTER IN CHANCERY: These two offices are frequently conflated in historical legal sources, and the confusion is understandable — both bore the title "Master" and both performed quasi-judicial or administrative functions ancillary to courts. The critical distinction is jurisdictional: the Master at Common Law served the common law courts (King's Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer), while the Master in Chancery served the Court of Chancery, the equity tribunal. Their functions differed accordingly. Masters in Chancery performed more substantive quasi-judicial work — taking evidence, conducting inquiries, reporting to the Lord Chancellor on complex factual and equitable questions. Masters at Common Law were more purely ministerial: procedural superintendence, cost taxation, oath administration, and record-keeping. Researchers encountering either term in historical sources should identify the court context before drawing any inference about the officer's duties or authority.
MASTER AT COMMON LAW vs. MODERN SPECIAL MASTER: The American federal court special master, governed today by Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, is a functional successor in name only. The modern special master is an ad hoc judicial adjunct appointed for specific litigation tasks — complex fact-finding, damage calculations, discovery oversight — and derives authority from court order and rule. The historical Master at Common Law was a permanent standing officer of the court with fixed institutional duties. The lineage is real but the resemblance is superficial.
Why It Matters in Research
This is primarily a term of historical English legal administration. Researchers will encounter it in three contexts: (1) English primary sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describing court procedure; (2) American treatises and commentaries that borrowed English procedural terminology before the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century and the eventual adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938; and (3) comparative discussions of judicial administration tracing the ancestry of modern special masters and court officers.
The key research trap is anachronism. American courts never fully adopted the office of Master at Common Law as a permanent institutional role. References to "master" in American sources more often point to a Master in Chancery, a referee, or — post-1938 — a Rule 53 special master. Do not assume that an American source using "master" in a common law court context is describing this specific English office.
The statutory reference in Black's — to 7 William IV and 1 Victoria, c. 30 — is the Uniformity of Process Act 1837 and related Victorian court reform legislation, which reorganized and codified the offices of the superior courts of common law. This locates the formal legal basis of the office in the early Victorian reform era, just before the Judicature Acts of 1873–1875 merged the common law and equity courts into the Supreme Court of Judicature and effectively dissolved the distinction between Masters at Common Law and other court officers.
Cost taxation — one of the principal out-of-court functions of Masters at Common Law — survives in modern practice as a function often assigned to court clerks or, in complex litigation, to special masters. Researchers tracing the history of cost-shifting rules and attorney fee review will find the Master at Common Law as a historical antecedent.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary, Burrill's Law Dictionary, and Rapalje & Lawrence are in close agreement on the substance of this office, which is unsurprising given that all three drew on the same English sources and the office was well-defined by statute by the time American legal dictionaries were being compiled. All three sources identify five officers per court and enumerate the same core duties.
Burrill's is the most descriptive of the three, subdividing duties between in-court and out-of-court functions and specifically identifying cost taxation as the principal out-of-court work. Black's provides the statutory anchor (7 William IV and 1 Victoria, c. 30) that Burrill's omits, which is useful for researchers needing the precise legal basis of the office.
What all three sources omit is any account of the office's eventual abolition. The Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, which merged the common law and equity sides of English superior court administration, rendered the specific designation "Master at Common Law" obsolete. The merged Supreme Court of Judicature used a unified set of Masters with consolidated functions. Historical dictionaries compiled before or shortly after this transition do not consistently flag this development, which means a researcher relying solely on Black's or Burrill's may not appreciate that the office had been reorganized by the time American legal practice was consolidating under the Field Code.
Jurisdictional Note
The Master at Common Law was an English office with no direct American institutional counterpart. American courts, operating in a merged or semi-merged law-and-equity environment in many states from an early date, developed their own referee and master practices. The closest surviving functional analog in American federal courts is the special master under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 53, but that role is ad hoc and case-specific, not a permanent court office.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia: Federal Common Law — Remaining Enclaves After Erie (civpro_211) — relevant for researchers tracing the relationship between English common law court procedure and American federal practice.