Definition
POSTMAN carries two distinct meanings in legal sources:
1. (English practice, historical) A senior barrister in the Court of Exchequer who held the privilege of precedence in making motions before the court. The title derived from the specific place where the barrister sat at the Exchequer bar. The postman and the tubman were the two most senior barristers attending the Exchequer, and they enjoyed the remarkable privilege of moving before even the King's Attorney General, Solicitor General, and other Crown counsel. The position was a mark of seniority earned through long and continuous attendance at the Exchequer bar, not an appointed office.
2. (General) A letter-carrier; a person who delivers mail.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone who delivers the post (mail) to residential or commercial addresses or from public mailboxes.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A post or courier; a letter carrier.
The common meaning of postman — mail carrier — is the definition most researchers will bring to the word. The legal meaning is entirely unrelated to postal delivery. When postman appears in English legal texts, particularly those touching Exchequer practice, it refers to a position of professional precedence at the bar, not to any postal function. Webster's 1913 captures both meanings, which confirms the dual usage was alive when many of the historical legal dictionaries were compiled; the ambiguity is therefore a genuine research trap.
Common Confusion
Postman and tubman are the paired senior positions at the Exchequer bar. They are sometimes mentioned together without explanation, and the distinction between them is rarely elaborated in legal dictionaries. Both held precedence over Crown counsel in motions, with the postman ranking first. Researchers encountering tubman should understand it as the companion term, not a separate rank of inferior standing.
Why It Matters in Research
The legal sense of postman is essentially dead in modern practice. The Court of Exchequer was abolished in England in 1875 when the Judicature Acts reorganized the superior courts, and the procedural customs of the Exchequer bar — including the postman privilege — disappeared with it. Any legal text using postman in its professional sense will therefore date to before 1875, or will be discussing historical Exchequer practice from a later vantage point.
Researchers working in pre-reform English equity or common law records, or reading treatises and reports from the Court of Exchequer, need to flag postman as a term of art rather than a postal reference. The Bunbury reports are a particular example: Burrill's dictionary notes that Bunbury himself had served as postman at the Exchequer bar for many years, which explains the authority and texture of those reports.
The Blackstone citation — 2 Bl. Comm. 28 — repeated across the dictionaries is the anchor reference for the legal sense. Any researcher tracing the term's doctrinal basis should start there.
In American legal sources, the professional sense of postman does not appear. American courts never inherited the Exchequer bar customs, so postman in any American legal document refers to the mail-carrier sense only.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on both definitions and on the Blackstone citation as authoritative support. Burrill provides the most substantive treatment of the professional sense, adding the detail that the postman's precedence extended even over the Attorney General and Solicitor General — a nuance the other dictionaries omit. Bouvier supplements the letter-carrier definition with an attribution to Webster's Dictionary, acknowledging that this meaning belongs to general rather than technical legal vocabulary.
Webster's 1913 is notable for preserving both meanings in a single entry and for introducing the tubman as the postman's paired counterpart, a connection the legal dictionaries mention only obliquely or not at all. Wiktionary follows the same dual structure. The historical dictionaries' consistent reliance on the single Blackstone reference suggests the legal profession never developed independent doctrinal literature on the postman's role beyond that citation; the custom was well understood by practitioners and required no further elaboration.
Jurisdictional Note
The professional sense of postman is exclusively English and applies only to the pre-1875 Court of Exchequer. It has no counterpart in American, Scottish, or Irish legal practice. Researchers should not import this meaning into any non-English jurisdiction.