Definition
Masters at common law were court-appointed officers attached to the superior courts of common law in England, responsible for performing specific administrative and quasi-judicial functions that fell outside the core adjudicative role of the judges. Their primary duties included taxing costs (calculating and approving the amounts of legal costs awarded to a party), computing damages, and taking affidavits. They served as the procedural workhorses of the court, handling the ministerial and technical tasks generated by litigation.
In the English system, each superior common law court maintained five such officers. Their appointment and functions were regulated by statute, most notably 7 Will. IV & 1 Vict. c. 30.
In American practice, the term "master" carried forward into equity courts and eventually into modern civil procedure, where a court-appointed master performs analogous functions — managing complex calculations, taking testimony, and reporting to the court — though the common law designation as a formal office title largely fell away in the United States.
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Common Confusion
MASTERS AT COMMON LAW vs. MASTERS IN CHANCERY: These are related but distinct offices. Masters in Chancery were officers of the equity courts (Chancery), not the common law courts, and historically held broader quasi-judicial functions, including hearing witnesses, taking accounts, and making recommendations on the merits of equitable questions. Masters at common law had a narrower, more ministerial scope — taxing costs and computing damages rather than deciding substantive equitable questions. Researchers encountering "master" in historical sources must determine from context whether the proceeding was at law or in equity, as the powers and procedures differed substantially. In American practice, the distinction was eventually collapsed as law and equity merged under unified procedural codes, with modern Rule 53 masters inheriting functions from both traditions.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a historical research term. It will appear in English case reports and procedural materials from roughly the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, particularly in sources dealing with cost awards, damage assessments, and affidavit practice. Researchers working with pre-Judicature Acts English common law — or with American state courts that modeled procedure on English common law practice before local procedural reform — may encounter references to masters performing these functions.
Two research traps deserve attention. First, the word "master" appears across several distinct office types in historical sources: masters at common law, masters in chancery, masters extraordinary, and masters in ordinary. Conflating these leads to misreading the nature of the proceeding. Second, American sources often use "master" loosely or as a shorthand, without specifying the common law or equity origin; the applicable powers and any reviewability questions depend on which tradition the court was drawing from.
For corpus researchers: references to cost taxation and the involvement of a "master" in common law actions in English sources almost certainly reference this office. References to broader merits-related functions suggest chancery practice instead. The five-officer structure per court is a useful identifying detail specific to the common law courts.
The American successor institution — the court-appointed special master under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 53 and its state analogs — is the living descendant of both lines of master practice and is where modern doctrine on delegated judicial functions is found.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is brief and functional, capturing the essentials: these were officers of the superior common law courts, five per court, with duties of taxing costs, computing damages, and taking affidavits, regulated by 7 Will. IV & 1 Vict. c. 30. Bouvier does not attempt to distinguish this office from chancery masters at length, though the entry's placement signals awareness that the offices were parallel rather than identical.
What Bouvier's entry does not address — and what researchers should supply from other sources — is the evolution of the office after the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873, which effectively merged the common law and equity courts and rationalized the master system into a unified structure. Historical dictionaries of this period generally treat masters at common law as a stable, well-understood feature of English practice and do not devote extensive analysis to the office because it was not a site of doctrinal controversy. Its importance was procedural and administrative rather than jurisprudential.
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Jurisdictional Note
This office as formally constituted did not exist in American federal courts, which inherited equity's master-in-chancery tradition rather than creating a parallel common law master structure. American states varied considerably; some recognized masters in equity contexts but not as a common law court office. The modern reference point in U.S. federal practice is the special master under Fed. R. Civ. P. 53.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia: Federal Common Law -- Remaining Enclaves After Erie (civpro_211) — relevant for understanding the procedural traditions that shaped American court officer practice after the English common law inheritance was absorbed and modified.
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