fiscal / procurator-fiscal

One of my favorite TV shows is Shetland, a police procedural set, obviously, on the Shetland Islands. One of the words that keeps popping up is fiscal. The detectives talk of referring matters to the “fiscal” or someone has to fly to Aberdeen to meet with the "fiscal office." At first I thought it was just a reference to monetary matters—after all investigations cost money and a high-profile murder case is going to need a lot of that—but it soon became clear that the context the word was used had to do with the prosecution of crimes and matters relating to what in the United States would be handled by a coroner’s office. I had stumbled on a common word that means something quite different in the jargon of the Scottish legal system; fiscal is shorthand for procurator-fiscal, the title given to a prosecutor in Scotland.

Fiscal comes to us from Romance languages and ultimately from Latin. Fiscus is the Latin word for the state treasury, and fiscalis is an adjective relating to matters concerning the public purse. A fiscus is literally a basket, originally a woven container for storing money which subsequently developed a figurative sense relating to the treasury or monetary matters. This monetary sense is present in classical Latin, and it can be found in Anglo-Latin from the early eighth century. The later borrowing into English was also influenced by Norman French. In English-language use, fiscal appears by the late sixteenth century. Here it is in the 1570 edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments:

Also, seing they [i.e., prelates] may bee alienated, they may be prescribed, especiallye (the kynges thus consenting who co[n]firmed the same so long a time) which excludeth all ryght both fiscall and ecclesiasticall.

This monetary sense is the one that is most prevalent in English around the world today.

Procurator also has its origins in Latin, but it is an older borrowing into English than fiscal. It comes to English from Latin via Anglo-Norman. In Latin a procurator is a manager or overseer of an estate, and during the Roman empire the word was also used to mean a tax-collector. In Anglo-Norman, the word referred to an agent or attorney who acted on behalf of another or a manager of an estate or a religious house or abbey, and the word is recorded at the beginning of the thirteenth century. That’s the sense that made it into English in the early fourteenth century. There is this description of Mary Magdalene from the c. 1300 Early South English Legendary and describes her as Christ’s procurator, the keeper of his household:

Marie þe Maudeleyne : ore swete louerd hire schrof,
Swete Iesu crist out of hir e : seue deuelene he drof.
Ore louerd makede hire is procuratour : his leof and is hostesse;
heo louede him with gret honour : in pays and in destresse.

(Mary Magdalene, our dear lord confessed her. Dear Jesus Christ drove seven devils out of her. Our lord made her his procurator, his beloved and his hostess; she loved him with great devotion, in peace and in distress.)

By the end of the fourteenth century, procurator had acquired an additional sense of an attorney or advocate, an extension of the agent sense. We see this sense in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale:

May I nat axe a libel, sire somonour,
And answere there by my procuratour
To swich thyng as men wole opposen me?

(May I not ask for a written copy of the charge, sir summoner,
And answer through my procurator
To such thing as men will accuse me?)

And in Scotland procurator combined with fiscal, and a procurator-fiscal was a prosecutor of crimes and served as a coroner. Originally, the procurator-fiscals were responsible for collecting fines, but the duties expanded over time. Scottish use of procurator, meaning prosecutor, can be found by the start of the fifteenth century. Procurator-fiscal in that sense appears by the middle of the sixteenth century. And by the late seventeenth century, procurator-fiscal was being clipped to just fiscal, which brings me full circle back to the TV series Shetland.

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 4, 2017, s.v. projuratour, n. https://anglo-norman.net/entry/procuratour

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Friar’s Tale” (c. 1395). The Canterbury Tales, 3.1595–97. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Foxe, John. The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contayning the Actes and Monumentes of Thynges Passed in Euery Kynges tyme in this Realme. London: John Daye, 1570, 456/2. ProQuest: Early English Books Online. Transcription available at: The Acts and Monuments Online.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. The Early South English Legendary (c. 1300). Early English Text Society O.S. 87. London: N. Trübner, 1887, lines 137–40, 466. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Latham, Ronald E., David R. Howlett, and Richard K. Ashdowne, eds. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. fiscalis, fiscus, procurator. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1879, s. v. fiscalis, fiscus, procurator. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. procuratour, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2007, s. v. procurator, n.1; procurator-fiscal, n.; second edition, 1989, s. v. fiscal, adj. and n.

Image credit: Enric, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.