Definition
A historical English legal term denoting bandits, profligate persons, or those who had been excommunicated. The term appears to have functioned as a legal status designation, grouping together persons who stood outside the ordinary protections and obligations of the law — whether by criminal conduct, moral condemnation, or formal ecclesiastical sanction.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a marker of archaic legal status with roots in early English ecclesiastical and customary law. Researchers encountering it in historical records, particularly in medieval or early modern English legal documents, should treat it as signaling a class of persons who may have been deprived of normal legal standing — comparable in effect, if not in precise meaning, to outlawry. The grouping of bandits alongside excommunicates is historically significant: excommunication in medieval England carried quasi-legal consequences, and persons subject to it could be barred from courts and civil life in ways that paralleled secular outlawry. Researchers should not assume the term had a precise statutory definition; it likely operated as a term of general legal and social opprobrium rather than a formal legal category with enumerated consequences. Its appearance in a source may indicate the document's ecclesiastical context or the blending of canon and common law frameworks typical of pre-Reformation England.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole historical source identifying this term, and Bouvier himself cites Cunningham (likely Timothy Cunningham's A New and Complete Law Dictionary, 18th century) as his authority, without providing further elaboration. This thin sourcing suggests bedeweri was a peripheral or obsolete term even by the time Bouvier compiled his dictionary. No independent definition or case law is offered, and the entry's brevity signals that the term had already fallen out of active legal use. Researchers should not expect to find judicial construction or statutory definition of this term in standard common law sources; its primary value is as a lexical artifact illuminating historical categories of social and legal exclusion.
Jurisdictional Note
This term appears to be of English origin and has no known counterpart in American law. It is unlikely to appear in any operative legal context outside of historical English records.