Definition
"Of a bishop" is an elliptical phrase used in English ecclesiastical law as a shortened reference to the Chancellor of a Bishop — an officer appointed to preside over the bishop's consistory court and to assist the bishop in the administration of ecclesiastical law. The chancellor acted as the bishop's legal surrogate, exercising judicial and administrative functions that the bishop himself, often a clergyman without formal legal training, was not equipped to perform directly. The office was a structural feature of the pre-Reformation and post-Reformation Church of England alike, persisting through the period when ecclesiastical courts held broad jurisdiction over matters including wills, marriages, defamation, and moral discipline.
Common Confusion
The phrase "of a bishop" as it appears in Burrill and similar sources is not a freestanding legal term but rather the tail end of a longer noun phrase — most likely "chancellor of a bishop" — abbreviated in index entries or marginal headings common to legal dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers encountering it in isolation may mistake it for a term of art defining a category of person or status. It is neither. It is a navigational label pointing to the chancellorship as an institution. Do not conflate the chancellor of a bishop with the bishop's commissary, a distinct officer with delegated but more limited authority, typically appointed for specific geographic areas or particular causes within the diocese.
Why It Matters in Research
This entry illustrates a recurring hazard in historical legal dictionary research: the alphabetized fragment. Burrill's entry appears under "Of a Bishop" because the full phrase ("Chancellor of a Bishop") would be filed elsewhere, and the dictionary cross-indexes it by its preposition-noun tail. Researchers working through Burrill or Tomlins in the Law Mind corpus should recognize that entries beginning with "of" are frequently truncated cross-references, not independent doctrinal terms.
For substantive research into the office itself, the relevant corpus path runs through ecclesiastical court jurisdiction, the consistory court, and the broader structure of the Church of England's legal administration as it existed before the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission reforms of the nineteenth century and the subsequent reorganization under the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure 1963 (England). Blackstone's Commentaries Book I, Chapter 11 (at page 382, the citation Burrill provides) remains the foundational secondary description of the chancellor's role in the diocesan structure. Researchers working with probate records, marriage bonds, or church discipline proceedings from before 1858 — when ecclesiastical jurisdiction over testamentary and matrimonial matters transferred to civil courts in England — will encounter the chancellor's court as the originating tribunal.
Jurisdictional awareness matters here: this office and its associated court structure were features of the established Church of England. Canon law equivalents existed in pre-Reformation Catholic ecclesiastical administration across Europe, but the term as used in English legal dictionaries refers specifically to the Anglican diocesan framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is spare to the point of being purely referential: it identifies the officer, names the function (holding the bishop's court, assisting in ecclesiastical law matters), and cites Blackstone and Tomlins. No doctrinal elaboration is offered. This reflects the entry's character as an index artifact rather than a substantive definition.
Blackstone (1 Bl. Com. 382) provides the substantive account Burrill points toward, describing the chancellor as the bishop's principal officer for exercising coercive jurisdiction, typically trained in civil and canon law, and holding a court of record within the diocese. Tomlins' Law Dictionary, one of Burrill's standard secondary sources, would have carried a comparable account under "Chancellor."
What historical sources collectively omit is any treatment of how the chancellor's role evolved under the pressure of ecclesiastical court reform in the nineteenth century, or how the office was eventually formalized and circumscribed under modern Church of England governance. That gap is significant for researchers whose sources span the reform period.
Jurisdictional Note
This office is specific to the Church of England and its diocesan structure. Anglican churches in other common law jurisdictions (including the Episcopal Church in the United States) developed analogous but distinct governance structures; the title "chancellor" persists in some American dioceses but without the historical court jurisdiction that defined the English office.