Definition
Ordainers (also Lords Ordainers) refers to a committee of English magnates — consisting of earls, bishops, and barons — appointed in 1310 by Parliament and confirmed by King Edward II to reform the royal household, finances, and administration. The Ordainers produced the Ordinances of 1311, a set of forty-one articles curtailing royal prerogative, limiting the king's ability to make war or leave the realm without baronial consent, and requiring parliamentary approval for key appointments. The term is used historically and has no active modern legal application, but it remains significant for the constitutional history of parliamentary authority and the limits of royal power in medieval England.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of ordainer — one who ordains.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who ordains; specifically, in ecclesiastical use, a person who confers holy orders.
The common meaning of ordainer derives from ecclesiastical practice — a bishop ordaining clergy — and carries no political or constitutional content. The legal-historical meaning is narrower and specific: it refers only to the named committee of 1310–1311 and their formal constitutional role. A researcher encountering "Ordainers" in a legal or historical source should not conflate this with clerical ordination.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English constitutional history, parliamentary origins, or the history of royal prerogative will encounter "Ordainers" primarily in two contexts: primary chronicle sources and constitutional history treatises discussing the reign of Edward II, and comparative analyses of medieval limitation instruments such as Magna Carta, the Provisions of Oxford (1258), and the Ordinances of 1311.
The term appears rarely in legal dictionaries precisely because it describes a historical body rather than a durable legal doctrine. Bouvier's entry is thin — identifying the term only as "one who ordains" — which signals that American legal dictionaries treat this primarily as a historical curiosity rather than a term of operative law. Researchers should not expect rich definitional treatment in standard legal dictionaries and should instead consult constitutional history sources directly.
A key research trap: the Ordinances of 1311 were formally revoked in 1322 at the Statute of York, which declared that matters touching the king and the realm required consent in Parliament but effectively reasserted royal authority. Sources written before and after 1322 treat the Ordainers' work very differently — as legitimate constitutional reform in sympathetic chronicles and as baronial overreach in royalist sources. Dating and provenance of source material matters significantly here.
For corpus researchers, the Ordainers sit at the intersection of several important constitutional threads: the development of parliamentary consent as a constraint on royal power, the history of royal household reform, and the long arc from Magna Carta to the eventual supremacy of Parliament. Connecting this entry to related constitutional instruments will yield more useful research paths than treating it as an isolated term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides only a fragment: "One who ordains." This is functionally unhelpful for legal-historical research and suggests that American legal lexicographers, writing for a practicing bar in the nineteenth century, had little occasion to elaborate on a medieval English constitutional committee. The snippet in the source material referencing indictments and counterfeit bank-bills appears to be a misattributed or garbled passage from a different Bouvier entry entirely and should be disregarded as source contamination.
Researchers should note that the more useful treatments of the Ordainers appear in constitutional history scholarship rather than legal dictionaries — notably in Stubbs's Constitutional History of England and Maitland's writings on medieval Parliament. These sources document the Ordainers' work as a significant, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to institutionalize parliamentary oversight of the crown.
Jurisdictional Note
The Ordainers and the Ordinances of 1311 are specific to the English constitutional tradition and have no direct counterpart in American, Scottish, or continental legal systems. Their relevance in modern legal research is confined to English constitutional history and comparative studies of parliamentary development.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Ordinances of 1311; Medieval English Constitutional History; History of Parliamentary Authority; Royal Prerogative