Definition
In ecclesiastical law, a bishop who refuses or neglects to examine and admit a patron's clerk to a benefice — without assigning a reason or giving notice — is styled a disturber. The designation carries a specific legal consequence: the bishop forfeits any title to present by lapse. The principle underlying this rule is that no person may take advantage of their own wrong. The term thus describes not merely a disruptive actor but a specific ecclesiastical officer whose procedural failure strips them of a right they would otherwise have held.
More broadly, at common law, a disturber is any person who interferes with another's peaceable enjoyment of a right — including rights of way or other incorporeal hereditaments — through obstruction, enclosure, or other impeding conduct.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone or something that disturbs; a disrupter.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who disturbs or disquiets; a violator of peace; a troubler. Also defined as one who interrupts or incommodes another in the peaceable enjoyment of his right.
The Webster's 1913 definition is unusually close to the legal meaning — which is itself a signal. The legal term of art is not a departure from ordinary English; it is ordinary English narrowed and given precise technical consequence. The gap matters in one direction: in law, being styled a "disturber" is not merely descriptive but operative, triggering the forfeiture of the bishop's lapse right. Common usage carries no such consequence.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is nearly exclusively an ecclesiastical law term of art in the primary sources. Researchers encountering it in historical English legal materials should understand they are almost certainly reading about the law of advowson and benefice — the system by which patrons held the right to present clergy to livings. The term's significance is procedural: it marks the point at which a bishop's failure converts from administrative delay into legal wrong with a specific remedy and forfeiture.
Trap for the unwary: the broader common-law usage — disturber of a right of way or incorporeal hereditament — appears in older treatises and reports without always being flagged as a distinct legal category. A researcher scanning for "disturber" in equity or real property contexts may encounter both senses in close proximity, and the ecclesiastical sense will dominate most dictionary treatments without clearly acknowledging the broader property law usage.
The Blackstone citation (2 Bl. Comm. 278) is the anchor for both the ecclesiastical definition and the property law context (3 Bl. Comm.). Researchers using Law Mind corpus materials on advowson, presentation, lapse, or the law of the church should treat this term as a navigational marker to those doctrinal neighborhoods. It does not appear in modern American law in any meaningful operative sense — American disestablishment eliminated the ecclesiastical law framework within which the term had practical force.
Historical corpus researchers should also note that Rapalje & Lawrence's entry gestures toward a criminal law adjacent usage ("disturbing" in crimes, citing 1 Ky. L. J. 184), suggesting a 19th-century American track where the term or its cognates appeared in the context of disturbing the peace or public order. This is a separate doctrinal line and should not be conflated with the ecclesiastical meaning.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd Editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement on the core definition, all tracing directly to Blackstone's Commentaries. The convergence is not surprising — this is a term whose meaning was fixed by a single authoritative passage and not meaningfully contested.
What the historical dictionaries omit: none of the three sources develops the broader right-of-way sense of "disturber" beyond a passing reference in Black's 2nd Edition. The ecclesiastical meaning so dominates the entries that researchers could easily miss that the term had wider application in property law contexts involving incorporeal rights generally. The Webster's 1913 definition — "one who interrupts or incommodes another in the peaceable enjoyment of his right" — actually captures this broader sense more fully than any of the legal dictionaries do.
The historical sources also provide no guidance on how American courts treated the term after disestablishment made the ecclesiastical framework inapplicable domestically. That silence is itself informative: the term effectively migrated into historical reference only, preserved in dictionaries long after it ceased to do operative legal work in American jurisdictions.
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Jurisdictional Note
The ecclesiastical law meaning of disturber is an English law term of art with no operative counterpart in American law. American researchers will encounter it in historical sources, treatises drawing on English common law, and corpus materials dealing with the colonial or early national period. In England, the law of advowson and presentation was operative until statutory reform in the twentieth century; the term retains historical significance there.
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