Definition
In old English and Latin legal practice, a narrator was a professional pleader — a person who drafted and delivered narrations (narrs) on behalf of litigants in court. The term is essentially synonymous with countor, the more commonly encountered English form, and denotes an advocate or attorney skilled in the formal art of oral pleading. The phrase serviens narrator designated a serjeant at law, the senior rank of common law pleader. The term is obsolete in modern practice.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who narrates or tells stories; the voice or viewpoint through which a story is told; the speaker providing voice-over in a documentary.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who narrates; one who relates a series of events or transactions.
The common meaning is not entirely unrelated to the legal one — both involve the act of recounting — but the legal term carries a precise professional and procedural identity that the ordinary word lacks entirely. In legal usage, narrator is a title of office and craft, not merely a description of an activity. A researcher encountering it in a historical legal text should not read it as simply "a person who told a story" but as a term of art for a recognized courtroom officer.
Common Confusion
Narrator and countor are functionally interchangeable in the historical sources, with countor being the more frequently used English form and narrator the Latin equivalent. Neither should be confused with the modern attorney or barrister, whose professional roles developed along different institutional lines after the decline of the serjeants at law. Additionally, narrator should be distinguished from narrator in the sense used in narration (the pleading document itself): the narrator is the person, the narr or narratio is the thing produced.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records — plea rolls, treatises, or Year Books — will encounter narrator and its cognates in Latin-language entries where the term identifies a party's pleader rather than describing a narrative act. Misreading narrator as a generic descriptor ("one who spoke") rather than a professional title can distort analysis of how advocacy was organized in pre-modern courts.
The most important corpus connection is to narr and narratio. A narrator drew narrs; understanding what narrs were (the count, or opening statement of the plaintiff's case in common law pleading) gives the professional role its context. Burrill's citation to Bracton and Stephen's Pleading is useful here — these sources situate the narrator within the formal pleading system of the common law.
The obsolescence of the term is complete: no modern jurisdiction uses narrator as a legal title. This means the term will appear almost exclusively in historical sources, and its absence from modern legal dictionaries should not mislead researchers into thinking it was marginal — the role it described was central to medieval English court practice.
Jurisdictionally, the term is exclusively an artifact of the English common law tradition and is not found as a legal title in civil law systems, though analogous pleading roles existed under different names.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries are in close agreement. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier define narrator as a countor and pleader who draws narrs, citing Fleta, book 2, chapter 37. Bouvier explicitly flags the term as obsolete. Burrill adds the most historical texture, tracing the term through Bracton and Stephen's Pleading and confirming the Latin root narrare, giving the term its connection to the act of recounting the plaintiff's cause.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on the procedural mechanics of what a narrator actually did in court beyond the brief identification as pleader and countor. Researchers seeking fuller treatment of the narrator's courtroom function should consult Bracton directly and the secondary literature on serjeants at law, as the dictionary sources treat the term more as a label than as a concept requiring explanation.
Jurisdictional Note
Narrator as a legal term of art is specific to the English common law tradition and its historical practice. It does not appear as an operative legal term in American, Scottish, or civil law jurisdictions, though early American courts inherited the common law pleading system from which the role derived.