Definition
An archaic English legal term denoting thieves, robbers, and vagrants who prey upon others by stealth or force. The word appears primarily in medieval English penal statutes, where it is used alongside companion terms such as "wasters" and "roberdsmen" to describe categories of itinerant criminals who disturbed the peace and preyed upon travelers and communities. The term is obsolete and carries no operative legal meaning in modern law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of drawlatch.
Historical common usage: Not recorded in Webster's 1913.
The common-language root is transparent enough — one who draws, or lifts, a latch, i.e., a sneak thief who enters without breaking. The legal usage, however, was broader and more categorical, grouping drawlatches with violent robbers and wandering criminals, not merely petty pilferers. The statutory term thus carried heavier connotations than the literal image of a latch-lifter suggests.
Common Confusion
Drawlatches is frequently grouped with "roberdsmen" and "wasters" in the same statutory clauses, and researchers sometimes treat all three as synonyms. They are not precisely interchangeable. Roberdsmen appear to denote a specific class of armed outlaws (associated in some sources with followers of a "Robert"), while wasters connotes idle, dissolute persons who squandered resources and lived by predation. Drawlatches more specifically implies cunning or stealthy theft, though in practice the statutes deployed all three terms together as a catch-all for criminal vagrants.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in two legislative contexts: the Statute of 5 Edward III, c. 14, and 7 Richard II, c. 5, both of which addressed public order, vagrancy, and the suppression of roving criminals in medieval England. Researchers working with these statutes or with commentaries on them — including Lambard's Eirenarcha — will encounter drawlatches as a term of art in that statutory language.
The primary research trap is assuming the word has a precise, judicially defined contour. It does not. It functioned as a legislative enumeration term — one entry in a list of criminal types — rather than as a term whose elements were ever formally adjudicated. No doctrine of "drawlatch liability" developed; no common-law test distinguishes a drawlatch from a waster. Researchers should treat it as statutory vocabulary signaling a general class of criminality rather than a technical category with independent legal content.
For historians of English criminal law, vagrancy law, or forest law, the term is a useful marker of period and legislative intent. It does not migrate into equity, chancery, or common-law pleading with any independent meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in full agreement on substance: drawlatches means thieves or robbers. Bouvier and Black offer the shortest glosses, citing Cowell's Interpreter as authority. Burrill is the most useful, citing both statutes (5 Edw. III, c. 14 and 7 Ric. II, c. 5) and Lambard's Eirenarcha, giving the researcher an actual trail to follow in period sources. Rapalje & Lawrence adds "wasters and roberdsmen" to the definition, reflecting the statutory grouping more faithfully than the bare "thieves and robbers" gloss found elsewhere.
None of the historical dictionaries offer substantive analysis or attempt to distinguish the term from its statutory companions. The entries are uniformly brief — acknowledgments of an obsolete term rather than working legal definitions. Black's entry is notably corrupted in the digitized source, embedding unrelated forest-law material about drifts and cattle, which appears to be a typesetting artifact; researchers should not read that material as part of the drawlatches entry.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Vagrancy and Public Order Offenses in Medieval English Law; Forest Law and the Common Law Tradition.