Catalogue description Records of the Cursitors' Office

A very substantial part of Chancery's responsibilities was the issue of 'original' writs. As centralised royal government included centralised royal justice, the writs of the Anglo-Saxon kings, relatively simple writs directing officials to carry out particular orders, came to be used to settle, or to provide for the settlement of, claims and counterclaims between private litigants.

The writs took various forms as the procedures developed; some required court-holding lords to do justice between litigants, others required the sheriff of the relevant county to secure the defendant's compliance or else his or her appearance in court to explain non-compliance, while others again effectively required the defendant's appearance in a royal court to answer the plaintiff. All these variations on the theme were explored extensively in the twelfth century, and by 1200 there were many types of writ, each designed to address a particular legal situation, and most designed to initiate litigation in the king's courts.

These writs were routine (writs 'of course', de cursu), and their preparation and issue fell to the third and lowest level of Chancery clerks, the cursitors. These clerks derived their name, ambiguously, both from the fact that their writs were de cursu and from a late Latin word for 'messenger'.

The volume of business was substantial; in 1389, and probably well before, there were twenty-four cursitors, and this number remained constant until the abolition of the office in 1835. In the fourteenth century cursitors were expected to write the writs themselves, unless age or infirmity necessitated the delegation of the work to an assistant. By the sixteenth century, however, the workload had increased, as had the status of the cursitors, and each cursitor had a 'secondary' or deputy. Since admission even as a secondary required a seven-year apprenticeship in Chancery, it is likely that the engagement of such apprentices allowed a further delegation of routine and supervised clerical work. Each cursitor, with his secondary and any other staff, undertook the business of a particular territorial division, county by county.

The cursitors boasted considerable professional status; they secured a charter of incorporation in 1573, and maintained their own building, with what amounted to club facilities as well as public and private offices, in what is now Cursitor Street. Professionally, the cursitors amounted to a minor and specialised inn of court, with self-regulation under ordinances authorised by the lord chancellor. This professional exercise of duties, however, dwindled, and by the eighteenth century all the work was done by the secondaries. By 1800 part of the Cursitors' Office was let as coffee-rooms, and by 1813 the corporation was wound up and the office transferred to a building in the Petty Bag Office. This presaged the abolition of the cursitors under the Officers in Court of Chancery Act (1835), whereby their functions and their records passed to the clerks of the Petty Bag.