a term applied to ministers of religion, and to some civil officers. The post-classical clerus and clericus have been satisfactorily traced to the Greek κληρος, a portion or heritage. In the distribution of the portions of the tribes under the Jewish dispensation, it was called the heritage of the tribe of Levi to receive the contributions of the faithful as persons set apart for the worship of God, and not endowed with a fixed inheritance. Hence the word came to be applied to the ministers or clergymen of the early church, and its meaning obtained an extended application to all men of learning, and persons who could compose or write documents, since these qualifications were almost the exclusive possession of the clergy. In the French dictionaries of Moreri and the Treveoux, an account of a variety of offices, lay and ecclesiastical, will be found under the head Clerc. In Britain, during the subsistence of monastic establishments, the term generally implied a secular priest in contradistinction to a regular.

Among the older English writers, the word clerk was almost invariably applied to a clergymen; and this is still its legal meaning when employed in formal documents, without any explanatory phraseology. In common language, it came to be synonymous with scribe, and has been applied to a large class of officers of varied functions and positions, from men who partake of the character of ministers of state down to humble copyists, whose qualification consists in the ability to write a legible hand. The rights and duties of clerks, involving the responsibilities which they may bring on their employers, are an important practical part of the law, but it comes properly under that general branch applicable to employer and employed, which it is usual to discuss under the head master and servant.

The proceedings of the two houses of parliament, of the various courts of justice, and of the several ministerial departments, are generally drawn and recorded by clerks who hold a position corresponding with the importance of their functions. The clerk of the parliaments is at the head of the ministerial officers, at the disposal of the legislature. He is considered as specially attached to the House of Lords in the separate proceedings of the two houses. The House of Commons is attended by a clerk of the House of Commons, who is an equally high and important officer, though nominally he is the deputy of the clerk of the parliaments. They are aided by a staff of assistants, and other subordinate clerks. Though the functions of these officers in attending to the order of business, authenticating bills and other documents, and drawing out the routine proceedings, are very onerous and distinguished, it is an important constitutional fact that the English legislature was ever jealous of allowing stipendiary officers to draw and put in terms their legislative acts. While in other countries the clerk or recording officer made up from his own account of what had taken place the legislative act in which it was embodied, the English parliament had the terms of the measure laid before it verbatim in the shape of a bill, leaving nothing to the discretion of a permanent stipendiary officer. Hence this class of functionaries failed to obtain in England the influence they have held elsewhere. In Scotland, the clerk of the parliaments and of the supreme courts of justice was a high officer of state, called the Lord Clerk Register, and the character of his influence may be inferred by a statement in Sir George M'Kenzie's annals, that the Clerk Register under Charles II. claimed some reward for drawing the acts of parliament favourably to the prerogative.

Until a comparatively late period, there were a large number of clerkships, connected chiefly with the courts of justice, having ancient and quaint names derived from some incident of their origin. Thus, there was the Clerk of the Hanaper and the Clerk of the Petty-bag, said to be so distinguished from the kind of receptacle—a hamper in the one case, and a little bag in the other—in which the writs in their custody were deposited. The Clerk of the Pells wrote on pells, or skins, while the Clerk of the Pipe, the head of an important department in the exchequer, was so named from the pipe-shaped roll in which he extended his accounts of debts to the crown. The reason why these venerable distinctions were religiously preserved was because they had each gradually accumulated an incrustation of fees and privileges, which made them valuable objects of patronage. The "six clerks" of the court of chancery, besides their emoluments, had the privilege of each naming ten of the "sixty clerks," who were agents licensed to conduct a particular kind of business; and in a similar manner a body of clerks in the privy-council office of Scotland, called Clerks to the Signet, acquired the peculiar privileges enjoyed by the respectable body of practitioners still called clerks, or more commonly Writers, to the Signet. The early jobbing in the patronage of the six clerks became picturesquely conspicuous in the pages of Clarendon. Sir Julius Caesar, a very aged man, being master of the rolls, proposed to provide for his son by making him one of the six clerks. The patronage was considered a prerequisite of the master of the rolls; but on this occasion the treasurer Portland gave it to another person, who paid £6000 for it. It was represented to the treasurer that he owed Sir Julius some indemnity; and desiring a memorandum of the matter, a slip of paper was given to him with the words "Remember Caesar" written on it. The careless lord treasurer allowed this memorandum to lie unnoticed until, after its cause was forgotten, it was discovered at a period of political alarm. He consulted his friends about the mystical document, and, as Clarendon says, "After a serious and melancholy deliberation, it was agreed that it was the advertisement from some friend who durst not own the discovery; that it could signify nothing but that there was a conspiracy against his life, and they all knew Caesar's fate by contemning or neglecting such animadversions."

Several public investigations, and especially those of the finance committees of 1797 and 1808, showed that the clerkships connected with the courts of justice went to increase the proper official income of statesmen, or to provide pensions for their relations. Thus in 1808 it appeared that the office of clerk of the crown in the king's bench, with an income of £12,511, was partitioned between the two sons of an influential marquis; the clerkship of the pells in Ireland was held by an eminent statesman with a salary of £3500; and the clerkship of the common pleas there, with an income of £11,094, belonged to an earl. The report of 1797 showed that the clerk of the hanaper in chancery was an earl and his heirs; and the report of 1808 showed the office in the possession of two ladies, his "sisters and co-heiresses." In some instances the clerkships appeared to be held in trust for persons who must have been supposed too young or too imbecile to grant the necessary receipts for the salary. What facilitated the existence of such offices, but at the same time rendered them the more oppressive, was that the incomes were derived from old fees on litigants, frequently commenced without warrant, and gradually acquiring an authoritative existence through long inveterate custom. At the time when such large incomes were thus drawn, the working clerks were often remunerated with a parsimony inimical to the public service. The tendency of late legislation has been to adjust the official staff of each department to its existing operative exigencies. Hence the clerkships with quaint names have gradually been abolished. Of the varied class of such offices which had to be mentioned as existing institutions in the previous editions of this work, some notion may be formed from what follows.

By two statutes of the year 1832, for regulating the establishments of the common law side of the exchequer and the court of chancery, several old consuetudinary clerkships were abolished, and among them that of the clerk of the pleas in the former, and in the latter the offices of clerk of the hanaper, clerk of the crown in chancery, clerk of the patents, clerk of custodiers of lunatics and idiots, clerk of the presentations, clerk of enrolments in bankruptcy, and clerk of dispensaries and faculties (2d and 3d Will. IV., cap. 10, 11). A list of offices of this kind, abolished, occupies a considerable schedule in an act passed in 1837 "to abolish certain offices in the supreme courts of common law, and to make provision for a more effective and uniform establishment of officers in those courts" (7th Will. IV., 1st Vict., cap. 30). Among the offices so abolished were, on the plea side of the queen's bench, the chief clerk, the clerk of the rules, the clerk of the papers, the clerk of the dockets and judgments, the clerk of the declarations, the clerk of the common bail or appearances estreets and postees, the clerk of the inner and upper treasurers, clerk of the outer treasury, clerks of nisi prius, clerk of the errors, clerk of the outlawries and filacer and exigentor; in the court of common pleas, the several clerks, of the judgments, of the outlawries, of the reversals of outlawries, of the dockets, of the warrants, enrolments, and estreets, of the essoins, of the treasury, of the juries, of the errors, of the jurats, and of the supersedes; in the exchequer court, there were abolished the clerk of the rules, the clerk of the errors, and the clerk of the pleas. (J.H.B.)