Definition
A referendary was a royal officer in early medieval administration charged with receiving petitions addressed to the king and referring them for decision or delivering the crown's response to petitioners. The term carried two closely related meanings in historical legal usage:
1. In Saxon law specifically: a master of requests — an officer through whom petitions to the king were channeled and to whom those petitions were formally referred for handling.
2. More broadly in medieval and early modern administrative practice: an officer of state responsible for processing royal diplomas and decrees, and in some usages, for conveying the sovereign's answer back to those who had petitioned the crown.
A secondary, looser historical usage applied the term to any person to whose decision a matter was referred — essentially synonymous with referee — though this usage was already archaic by the early modern period and carries no independent legal weight today.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One to whose decision a cause is referred; a referee. Also, an officer who delivered the royal answer to petitions, or an officer charged with procuring and dispatching diplomas and decrees.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One to whose decision a cause is referred; a referee (marked as obsolete by Bacon's era). Also a royal officer delivering answers to petitions ("referendaries, or masters of request") and an officer procuring and dispatching diplomas and decrees.
The common language and legal definitions track closely here, but with an important gap: the general English usage kept alive the broader sense of "one to whom something is referred" well past the point where legal sources had narrowed the term to its specific institutional meaning — a defined royal administrative office. Researchers encountering referendary in a legal context should resist reading it as a generic synonym for referee or arbitrator; the legal dictionaries consistently anchor it to the Saxon and medieval royal administrative structure.
Common Confusion
REFERENDARY vs. REFEREE: The surface resemblance is real — both derive from the concept of referring a matter to another person. But a referee is a judicial or quasi-judicial officer appointed by a court to hear evidence and report findings, an ongoing role in modern civil procedure. A referendary was a pre-judicial administrative officer within the royal household, not a creature of the courts at all. Conflating the two distorts the institutional history of both roles. See REFEREE.
REFERENDARY vs. REFERENDARIUS: Burrill cites the Latin form referendarius as the direct antecedent. Legal Latin sources, particularly ecclesiastical and continental European texts, use referendarius for a comparable office in Frankish administration and in the papal curia. The two terms describe analogous but institutionally distinct offices and should not be treated as interchangeable across different legal traditions.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter referendary almost exclusively in historical sources — Saxon law commentaries, Spelman's Glossary, and works touching on early English royal administration. The term is functionally extinct in modern legal practice and does not appear in contemporary statutes or case law.
The primary research trap is anachronism: because referendary sounds like referee, early modern legal writers occasionally used it loosely for any person to whom a matter was sent for decision. Bacon's usage, already flagged as obsolete by Webster's 1913, illustrates how quickly the term's precise institutional meaning eroded in general legal writing. When encountering the word in sources from roughly the sixteenth century onward, verify from context whether the writer means the specific Saxon royal officer or is simply using the term as a loose synonym for referee.
For corpus researchers, the term is a reliable marker of sources engaging with pre-Conquest English legal institutions or with Spelman's scholarship on Saxon law. Its appearance signals proximity to discussions of the witan, the royal household, and the administrative machinery of Anglo-Saxon government — not to procedural or adjudicatory law. Connections to the Law Mind corpus run through constitutional history and the development of the royal prerogative rather than through civil procedure.
Jurisdictional variation is not a meaningful concern for this term: it has no living jurisdiction-specific meaning and its historical meaning is essentially uniform across the English legal dictionary tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement, drawing on a single authoritative source — Spelman's Glossary — and reproducing substantially the same definition. Black's (both editions) and Burrill define referendary as "a master of requests; an officer to whom petitions to the king were referred," citing Spelman directly. Burrill adds the Latin antecedent referendarius and ties the definition explicitly to Saxon law. Rapalje & Lawrence offer the slightly broader formulation — "one to whose decision anything is referred" — citing both Cowell and Spelman, which suggests they were incorporating the looser early modern usage alongside the institutional definition.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the parallel usage of referendarius in Frankish and ecclesiastical administration, which is better documented in continental legal history than in the English legal dictionary tradition. Researchers needing that dimension will need to go beyond these sources to works on Carolingian administrative law or the history of the papal curia. The English dictionaries treat referendary as a Saxon law term and do not engage with its broader European institutional history.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Saxon Law; Royal Prerogative; Masters of Requests