Definition
Six Clerks were officers of the English Court of Chancery responsible for the administrative and record-keeping functions of that court. They received and filed bills, answers, replications, and other pleadings; signed office copies of pleadings; examined and signed dockets of decrees; and maintained custody of all records within their office. The Six Clerks' Office was the institutional home of Chancery's paper record — the repository through which equity proceedings were formally documented and preserved.
The office originated at least as early as the reign of Richard II, when the Master of the Rolls was assigned six clerks to assist in keeping records and making required entries. Over time the Six Clerks evolved from assistants to the Master of the Rolls into independent officers with defined duties and a distinct office within the Chancery structure. Each clerk superintended a division of the court's work and supervised a body of subordinate clerks beneath him, sometimes called "waiting clerks" or "under-clerks," through whom much of the day-to-day clerical labor was actually performed.
The office was abolished by statute — 5 Victoria, chapter 5 — as part of the early Victorian reorganization of the courts of equity that swept away many of the inherited administrative structures of the old Chancery.
Common Confusion
The Six Clerks should not be confused with the Masters in Chancery, who performed quasi-judicial functions — taking evidence, examining witnesses, computing accounts, and reporting to the Chancellor. The Six Clerks were administrative and record-keeping officers, not adjudicative ones. Researchers encountering Chancery procedural history may also conflate the Six Clerks with the Clerks of the Petty Bag or other specialized Chancery officers; these were distinct positions with different functions and different supervisory chains within the court.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely of historical significance. No modern court structure preserves the Six Clerks or their office, and the position has no functional successor under that name. Researchers encounter it primarily in three contexts:
First, in English legal history and equity procedure before the mid-nineteenth century. Any primary source discussing Chancery pleading, record-keeping, or office practice from roughly the fourteenth century through 1842 may reference the Six Clerks or their office. Understanding their role is essential for interpreting procedural descriptions in pre-Victorian equity treatises and reports.
Second, in treatises on equity jurisdiction and Chancery practice. Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 443) discusses the Six Clerks in the context of Chancery procedure, and that reference appears in every major dictionary entry for this term. Spence's Equitable Jurisdiction (cited by Rapalje & Lawrence) provides the most detailed historical account of the office's origins and evolution. Researchers working with these treatises should expect the Six Clerks to appear as a structural feature of the court, not merely a curiosity.
Third, in the reform literature of the nineteenth century. The abolition of the Six Clerks by 5 Vict. c. 5 was part of a broader movement to rationalize and modernize English equity administration. Understanding what was abolished clarifies what the reformers were responding to.
One navigational trap: the number "six" was a historical artifact that did not always correspond precisely to actual staffing at any given moment. The office is a fixed institutional label, not a headcount. Sources treating the term loosely may create confusion about the court's actual administrative capacity.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition. All four identify the Six Clerks as Chancery officers responsible for filing pleadings, signing office copies, docketing decrees, and maintaining records. All cite 3 Blackstone's Commentaries 443 and note abolition by 5 Vict. c. 5. Burrill adds the Latin form (sex clerici) and the additional citation to Fleta, lib. 2, c. 13, § 15, giving the office's roots a deeper common-law documentary foundation.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the most historically informative of the four, tracing the office to the time of Richard II and its connection to the Master of the Rolls, and citing Spence's Equitable Jurisdiction for the institutional detail. This context is missing from the Black's and Burrill entries, which treat the Six Clerks as a static definition rather than an evolved institution.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is any account of how the office functioned in practice — the relationship between the Six Clerks and their subordinate clerks, the fee structures that sustained the office, or the specific procedural moments at which the Six Clerks' involvement was required. Researchers seeking that level of detail should go directly to Spence, Holdsworth's History of English Law, or primary reform commission reports from the 1820s–1840s.
Jurisdictional Note
The Six Clerks were exclusively an English institution. No American court system adopted or replicated this office. American equity practice, to the extent it developed analog administrative structures, did so independently and without preserving this terminology.