Definition
"Ities" does not constitute a recognized legal term. The entries retrieved under this heading in the source dictionaries are artifacts of an indexing or OCR error — fragments of entries for other terms (likely "CUSTOS SPIRITUALITATIS," "GUARDIAN OF THE SPIRITUALITIES," and "OFFICIAL CUSTODIAN FOR CHARITIES") that have been misattributed to the string "ities," which is simply a common English plural suffix appearing at the tail end of longer words such as "spiritualities" or "charities."
No independent legal definition exists for "ities" as a standalone term.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers using digitized historical legal dictionaries — including scanned and OCR-processed editions of Black's and Bouvier's — will occasionally encounter garbled headwords produced when a word's final characters are parsed as a separate entry. The string "-ities" appears frequently in legal vocabulary (spiritualities, charities, jurisdictions of various kinds) and is a predictable site of this error. If a search of the Law Mind corpus surfaces "ities" as a headword, treat it as a pointer to the surrounding entries rather than a term of art in its own right.
The substantive content embedded in the retrieved fragments belongs to the following distinct topics:
— CUSTOS SPIRITUALITATIS: The officer entrusted with spiritual jurisdiction of a diocese during a vacancy of the see. A term of English ecclesiastical law.
— GUARDIAN (or WARDEN) OF THE SPIRITUALITIES: The person to whose custody a vacant see or abbey was committed by the Crown. Closely related to the above; sometimes used interchangeably in older sources.
— OFFICIAL CUSTODIAN FOR CHARITIES: A creature of Victorian statute (Charitable Trusts Acts, 16 & 17 Vict. c. 137, as amended by 18 & 19 Vict. c. 24), functioning as a corporation sole for the purpose of holding real property and leaseholds on trust for endowed charities in England. A bare trustee only.
Researchers interested in any of these concepts should search under the correct headwords rather than "ities."
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary do not contain entries for "ities" as a term. The source material provided reflects truncated or misparsed fragments. Black's definitions correspond to ecclesiastical vacancy officers; Bouvier's fragment addresses the English Charity Commission structure created by mid-Victorian legislation. Both bodies of doctrine are real and researchable — they simply do not belong under this headword.