Definition
A nonjuror is a person who refuses to take a required oath of allegiance. In legal and historical usage, the term refers almost exclusively to a specific class of persons — principally Anglican clergy and laymen — who, following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, refused to swear allegiance to William III and Mary II on the ground that their prior oath to James II remained binding. Many nonjurors held that James, whatever his faults, had not been lawfully deposed, and that swearing to his successors would constitute perjury. The refusal carried serious legal consequences: clergy who declined the oath were ejected from their livings, and lay nonjurors faced civil disabilities including exclusion from public office.
The term is occasionally used in a broader, non-historical sense to mean any person who refuses to take a particular oath — a usage Wiktionary preserves — but this secondary sense rarely appears in legal authorities and carries little technical weight.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone who refuses to swear a particular oath; specifically, a clergyman who refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary in 1689. Also, one who is not a juror.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One of those adherents of James II who refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary, or to their successors, after the revolution of 1688; a Jacobite.
The legal and common meanings here are unusually well aligned — both traditions center the word on the post-1688 oath crisis. The wrinkle is Wiktionary's secondary gloss ("one who is not a juror"), which is etymologically defensible but historically anomalous. In legal sources, nonjuror never means a non-juror in the jury sense; conflating the two would be an error with no basis in the historical record.
Common Confusion
NONJUROR vs. NON-JUROR: These look nearly identical but refer to entirely different things. A nonjuror (one word or hyphenated, historically) is a person who refuses an oath of allegiance. A non-juror is simply a person who is not serving on a jury. The confusion is orthographic and contextual rather than doctrinal, but researchers working with 17th- and 18th-century ecclesiastical or political records should not mistake a reference to "nonjurors" as having anything to do with jury service.
NONJUROR vs. RECUSANT: Recusants refused to attend Church of England services; nonjurors refused to swear the Restoration-era or post-Revolution oaths. The populations overlapped — many Catholic recusants were also nonjurors — but the terms identify distinct legal disabilities arising from distinct statutes. A nonjuror might be a conforming Anglican who simply objected to swearing against the Stuarts.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely a term of English constitutional and ecclesiastical history. Researchers will encounter it in sources spanning roughly 1689 to the mid-18th century, after which the nonjuring movement faded and the term largely dropped from active legal use.
Several navigational points matter:
First, the legal disabilities imposed on nonjurors were statutory, tied to specific oath acts passed by Parliament in the aftermath of 1688. Understanding which act applied — and when subsequent acts altered or relaxed the penalties — is essential to reading cases and records from this period accurately. The original oath requirement under the 1689 Act imposed a six-month compliance window; later acts extended or modified terms.
Second, the nonjuring clergy formed a separate ecclesiastical structure for several decades, with their own bishops and succession. Records of this shadow church can appear in archives under categories that obscure the nonjuring connection. Researchers in ecclesiastical law, property disputes over benefices, or probate records touching clergy estates should watch for the designation.
Third, Scottish sources use the term differently in emphasis. Scottish Episcopalians who refused the oaths were a distinct and larger community than their English counterparts, and Scottish legal consequences diverged from English ones. A corpus researcher conflating English and Scottish nonjuring records risks anachronism.
Fourth, because the nonjuring movement was also a theological and political movement, the term appears heavily in pamphlet literature, sermons, and polemical tracts — sources that use the word with partisan coloring. Rapalje & Lawrence's neutral phrasing ("conceiving the Stuart family unjustly deposed") preserves the nonjurors' own framing, which may not reflect how opposing legal authorities characterized them.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence capture the essential legal meaning concisely: refusal to swear allegiance to the post-Stuart succession, grounded in the refuser's belief that the Stuarts had been unjustly deposed. Webster's 1913 adds useful detail by identifying the movement explicitly with Jacobitism and noting that the refusal extended to successors of William and Mary, not only to William and Mary themselves — a point with legal significance, since the oath obligation persisted and the nonjuring community shrank only gradually as the Stuart claimants died out.
Neither source addresses the statutory architecture behind the oath requirements, the specific disabilities that followed refusal, or the distinct Scottish dimension. Neither flags the occasional broader usage of nonjuror to mean any oath-refuser outside the 1688 context. For legal research purposes, the historical dictionaries are useful for orientation but insufficient for primary-source work, which requires engagement with the relevant oath acts and the ecclesiastical records of ejected clergy.
Jurisdictional Note
The term and its legal consequences are rooted in English law, though Scottish law imposed analogous disabilities on Scottish Episcopal nonjurors under separate legislative frameworks. The concept has no meaningful American legal history — colonial and early republic oath controversies used different terminology and arose from different constitutional frameworks.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Oaths of Allegiance; Jacobitism; Test Acts; Ecclesiastical Benefices