mastership

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The state or office of a master.

   “[...] wee haue one in heauen who is maister of vs all, as sainct Paule sayeth: there will be no accepting of persons, there shall bee no more bondage or mastershippe for men too alleage before God.”

   “A Repentant Sinner is the Child of Grace, who being borne for the seruice of God, makes no reckoning of the mastershippe of the world [...]”

   “Then, to preſerve the Fame of ſuch a deed, / For Python ſlain, he [Phoebus or Apollo] Pythian Games decreed. / Where Noble Youths for Maſterſhip ſhou'd ſtrive, / To Quoit, to Run, and Steeds and Chariots drive.”

   “Johnson, in August 1738, went, with all the same of his poetry, to offer himself a candidate for the mastership of the school at Appleby, in Leicestershire.”

   “[...] Chips, like some old sea captain, still measured time by the signals of the past; and well he might, for he lived at Mrs. Wickett’s, just across the road from the School. He had been there more than a decade, ever since he finally gave up his mastership [...]”

2. (countable, uncountable)Mastery: dominion, superiority, control.

   “[...] you may begin to dig your ground in the beginning, so all along Winter till the very day of setting, and then you must keep it with weeding and hoing till it have got the mastership of the weeds and then it being a weed of it self wil destroy all other.”

   “Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas! Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems!”

   “I cannot doubt my mastership of fate, Nor bind my boundless soul.”

3. (countable, uncountable)Mastery: superior skill.

   “Where is your ancient courage? you were used To say extremity was the trier of spirits; That common chances common men could bear; That when the sea was calm all boats alike Show’d mastership in floating [...]”

   “Some swallow every thing whole and unmix’d; so that it may rather be call’d a Heap, than a Pudding. Others are so Squeamish, the greatest Mastership in Cookery is requir’d to make the Pudding Palatable [...]”

4. (countable, obsolete, uncountable)Chief work; masterpiece.
5. (countable, uncountable)A title of respect, sometimes ironic.

   “c. 1531, John Frith, A Disputacion of Purgatorye, Antwerp: S. Cock, Book 2, Thus hath Master More a full a[n]swere both to his scriptures which were to farre wrested out of their places and also to his awne apparent reasons. How be it if his mastershippe be not fullye pacyfyed let him more groundlye open his minde and bringe for his purposse all that he thinketh to make for it and I shall by goddes grace shortlye make him an answere and guyet his minde.”

   “How now, Signior Launce! what news with your mastership?”

   “[…] lacke you not a neate handsome and cleanly yong Lad, about the age of fifteene or sixteene yeares, that can runne by your horse, and for a neede make your Mastershippes shooes as blacke as incke, howe say you sir.”