Definition
Sine cura (Latin: "without cure") describes a position, office, or benefice that carries an income, title, or status but imposes no substantive duties on the holder. The term is the root of the English word "sinecure" and appears in legal texts primarily in two contexts:
1. Ecclesiastical law: A church benefice or living held by a clergyman who receives its revenues but bears no pastoral responsibility for the souls of a parish — no "cure of souls" (cura animarum).
2. Civil and public office: A government post or official appointment that entitles the holder to emoluments, fees, or salary without requiring the performance of meaningful work or discharge of defined public functions.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A sinecure is a position that requires little or no work but provides a salary or other benefit; colloquially, any easy, well-paid job.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "An office which has revenue without any employment; specifically, an ecclesiastical benefice without cure of souls."
The gap between common and legal usage is narrow but worth noting. In ordinary modern speech, "sinecure" is used loosely to mean any cushy or undemanding job. In legal and historical sources, the term carries precise structural meaning: the defining feature is not merely ease of work but the formal absence of legally recognized duties attached to the office or benefice — a distinction that mattered when courts or Parliament examined whether an officeholder could be legally compelled to perform, or lawfully dismissed for non-performance.
Common Confusion
Sine cura (the Latin form) and sinecure (the anglicized form) are the same concept and should be treated as equivalent in research. Researchers should not assume the Latin form signals an older or narrower legal meaning — both appear in ecclesiastical and civil contexts across the same periods.
Sine cura should also be distinguished from a plurality of benefices (holding multiple livings simultaneously), though the two often overlapped in practice. A clergyman could hold a sine cura benefice as one of several livings, but the concepts are analytically separate: plurality concerns the number of offices held; sine cura concerns the absence of duties attached to a particular office.
Why It Matters in Research
Ecclesiastical context dominates. Researchers will encounter sine cura almost exclusively in sources dealing with church law, the established church in England, and reform debates from the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries. Parliamentary proceedings, ecclesiastical commission reports, and Chancery cases touching on tithe and church property are the primary venues.
The term becomes legally charged in the context of church reform. The Pluralities Act 1838 (1 & 2 Vict. c. 106) and related Victorian-era legislation targeted sinecure benefices directly, making the precise legal definition of "cure of souls" consequential for determining which livings were subject to regulation, consolidation, or abolition. Researchers using earlier sources should be alert to the fact that what counted as a sine cura benefice was contested, not merely descriptive.
In public law contexts, sine cura offices appear in debates over parliamentary corruption, place bills, and civil list reform in Britain. The legal significance there was whether holding such an office disqualified a member of Parliament or constituted a corrupt grant of Crown patronage.
American legal sources use this term rarely and mostly in borrowing from English ecclesiastical or administrative law commentary. Researchers in American legal history are unlikely to encounter it except in comparative or treatise contexts.
Burrill's cross-reference to Cura is the essential companion entry — the legal meaning of sine cura is only fully intelligible against the background of what cura (charge, care, guardianship, or cure of souls) meant in the applicable context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is characteristically compressed: "Without cure or charge; without any duty attached." This is accurate as far as it goes but elides the important distinction between ecclesiastical and civil applications. Burrill points researchers to Cura without further elaboration, which means the entry functions as a cross-reference marker rather than a standalone explanation.
No other source dictionaries were available for comparison. Researchers consulting historical legal dictionaries should expect that entries for Latin-form terms of this kind were typically brief, assuming the reader's familiarity with Latin and with the ecclesiastical law context. Substantive treatment of the legal and policy dimensions of sinecures appears in treatises on ecclesiastical law (such as Burn's Ecclesiastical Law) and in parliamentary commentary rather than in the dictionaries themselves.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is primarily English ecclesiastical and constitutional law. Scottish church law used related but distinct terminology under the Presbyterian system. In American law, the constitutional prohibition on titles of nobility and the absence of an established church mean the precise ecclesiastical sense of sine cura has no direct domestic application, though the concept of an office without duties surfaces in public employment and civil service law under different vocabulary.