Definition
A servant is a person employed to render personal services to another — the master — under a contract of hire, who remains subject to the master's control and direction in the performance of those services, and who does not act in the pursuit of an independent calling. The relationship is defined less by the nature of the tasks performed than by the degree of control the master exercises over how the work is done.
In classical common law usage, the servant stood at the center of the master-servant doctrine, the body of law governing the rights and liabilities arising from this relationship. Crucially, when a servant causes harm to a third party while acting within the scope of employment, the master bears vicarious liability for that harm — the foundational principle now carried forward under the doctrine of respondeat superior.
The term also had a narrower, domestic sense: servants or domestics were those who received wages, resided in the household of the employer, and performed household duties. This domestic subclass was legally significant in areas ranging from poor law administration to testimonial competency in early American and English courts.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One hired to perform regular household or other duties and receive compensation; as opposed to a slave. More broadly, one who serves another in any capacity.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One employed by another for menial offices or other labor, subject to the employer's command; a subordinate helper.
The common meaning of servant has narrowed in modern speech to imply domestic labor — housekeepers, attendants, household staff — while the legal meaning was always broader, covering virtually any employed person subject to another's direction and control. The legal significance of the term was never about the menial or domestic character of the work, but about the control relationship. A skilled tradesman working under close supervision could be a servant at law; a domestic worker engaged through an independent agency might not be. This gap between the domestic connotation and the legal functional test has caused persistent confusion in historical sources and early cases.
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Common Confusion
SERVANT vs. INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR: The most consequential distinction in the doctrine. An independent contractor performs services for another but exercises independent judgment as to the means and methods of the work — the hiring party controls only the result, not the process. A servant is subject to the master's direction and control over how the work is accomplished. The distinction matters enormously for vicarious liability: masters are liable for the torts of servants acting within the scope of employment; they are generally not liable for the torts of independent contractors. Historical sources often struggle with borderline cases — farm laborers, skilled artisans, casual workers — and the line was contested across nineteenth-century American and English courts.
SERVANT vs. AGENT: An agent acts on behalf of the principal and has authority to affect the principal's legal relations with third parties. A servant acts for the master but may have no such representational authority. All servants may be agents in some circumstances, but not all agents are servants. The terms were frequently conflated in older sources, particularly in commercial contexts.
SERVANT vs. SLAVE: English and American law distinguished servants — who served under contract for wages, retaining legal personhood — from slaves, who were property. The distinction was foundational but legally fraught in antebellum American jurisdictions, and some historical sources handle it with varying degrees of care.
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Core Elements
For a relationship to qualify as master and servant at common law, courts generally required:
1. CONTRACT OF SERVICE: An agreement, express or implied, to render personal services. Gratuitous service could sometimes establish the relationship, but the consensual basis was essential.
2. PERSONAL SERVICE: The servant performed the work personally, rather than delegating performance at will. The ability to substitute another worker without the master's consent was a marker of independent contractor status.
3. CONTROL AND DIRECTION: The master directed not merely the result of the work but the manner, means, and method by which it was performed. This is the decisive criterion. A master who controls only the outcome has likely hired an independent contractor.
4. COMPENSATION: Typically wages or other remuneration, though the precise form varied. Domestic servants were often paid partly in room and board.
5. SCOPE OF SERVICE: Vicarious liability attaches only when the servant acts within the scope of employment — in furtherance of the master's business, not on a personal frolic.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Domestic Servant: One who lives in the master's household and performs household duties. Had distinct legal treatment in poor law, bastardy, tax, and testimonial contexts.
General Servant: Employed by a single master for general duties over a period of time.
Special Servant (or Borrowed Servant): A servant lent by one master to another for a particular task. Courts in historical and modern cases have struggled to assign liability when a borrowed servant causes harm — the question being which master exercised control at the moment of the tort.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a research pivot point. Servant in the historical corpus is doing work that modern legal materials distribute across three successor concepts: employee (labor and employment law), agent (agency law), and worker (tort and vicarious liability). A researcher searching historical sources for employment-law questions must be fluent in master-servant vocabulary; failing to run servant alongside employee will produce a systematically incomplete picture of pre-twentieth-century doctrine.
The control test — the master's direction over how work is done, not merely what is done — appears in embryonic form in the historical sources and is refined through accumulated case law into the twentieth century. Researchers tracing the evolution of the independent contractor distinction will find the historical dictionaries point to case collections (Rapalje & Lawrence is particularly useful here for citations by proposition), but the doctrinal refinement happens in the reporters, not the dictionaries.
Jurisdictional variation among American states in the nineteenth century was substantial, particularly on questions of domestic servants' legal status, poor law settlement, and the liability of masters for servants' criminal acts. Sources from different states should not be treated as uniform.
The transition from servant to employee as the standard term occurs roughly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tracking the rise of industrial labor, statutory regulation, and workers' compensation schemes. By the mid-twentieth century, servant had become a term of art confined largely to tort and agency contexts (Restatement of Agency; Restatement Second of Torts), while the everyday workplace relationship was governed by employment law vocabulary. Researchers working across this transition period must track both terms.
Burrill and Black (1st Ed.) both give definitions rooted in control and contract, which is sound. The 2nd edition of Black's has a retrieval error in the source material provided — the relevant entry may have been displaced in digitization. Anderson's Dictionary similarly presents an indexing gap in the available extract. Researchers should verify against physical editions for completeness.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on two elements: contract of hire and control. Black's 1st Edition, drawing on the California Civil Code, emphasizes that the servant "remains entirely under the control and direction" of the master — the control test stated plainly. Burrill reaches the same conclusion through the lens of the service contract, citing Kent's Commentaries for elaboration. Both formulations are functionally consistent with the common law as it developed.
Rapalje & Lawrence is more useful as a finding tool than as a definitional source, routing researchers to primary authorities by proposition — who is a servant, who is not, and how servant is distinguished from apprentice. This structure reflects the dictionary's case-digest character and is most valuable for locating nineteenth-century American authorities on contested questions.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law does not appear to provide a substantive entry for servant in the available extract, which is a gap worth noting. For the domestic servant's specific legal incidents — settlement under poor laws, wage lien rights, liability for harboring — researchers will need to look beyond general dictionary coverage to specialized treatises, particularly on English law.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underserve: the borrowed servant problem, the agent-servant distinction, and the emerging independent contractor category. These questions were live in the courts throughout the nineteenth century but receive limited treatment in the dictionary literature, which remained anchored to classical formulations.
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Jurisdictional Note
The master-servant doctrine was common law across English and American jurisdictions, but statutory overlays varied significantly. English poor law gave the servant's settlement in a parish distinctive legal consequences that had no direct American counterpart. American states diverged on whether certain classes of workers — railroad employees, farm laborers, casual workers — qualified as servants for vicarious liability purposes. Modern employment law has largely displaced the servant category with statutory definitions of employee that vary by jurisdiction and by statute.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Master and Servant (primary); Respondeat Superior; Independent Contractor; Agency.
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