Single Comment

Chancellor. Moves like rook or as knight.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Sat, Jan 18, 2003 10:30 PM UTC:

The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary agrees with you, but Merriam Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition) offers Marshall as a variant
spelling. Based on sources available on the web, both Christian Freeling
and Jose Raul Capablanca have used the double-l spelling of Marshall. This
spelling is used on Freeling's own mindsports.net website, and it is used
in a quotation from Capablanca provided on the page

http://www.chessvariants.com/programs.dir/capaprogdesc.html

I believe there is no general consensus on the name of this piece. My own
preference is for Marshall over Chancellor, and I disfavor calling it the
Chancellor. First of all, Capablanca's original name for the piece was
Marshall. Second, Capablanca created confusion around the name Chancellor
by using it for each of the two extra pieces in his Chess variant. In
1929, he used this name for the piece he later called the Archbishop.
Third, the word Marshall has its etymological roots in a word for horse.
The word is marah, which is etymologically related to our word mare. In
its original uses, a Marshall was someone who worked with horses. This is
suitable for a piece that gains the leaping powers of the Knight, a piece
that was originally known as a horse. But the word Chancellor comes from a
Latin word for doorkeeper, which has nothing to do with horses. Also, the
name Chancellor has been more widely used for different pieces, whereas
the name Marshall has more consistently been used for this piece. Besides
the Bishop-Knight piece, which was once called a Chancellor by Capablanca,
the game King's Court uses the name Chancellor for a very different piece.