Definition
An owler was a person engaged in owling — the smuggling of wool, sheep, or other prohibited goods out of England, typically at night and in violation of export controls. The term was specific to English law and designated the individual offender rather than the act itself. Bouvier defines an owler simply as one guilty of the offense of owling.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The alder tree.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "One who owls; esp., one who conveys contraband goods." Marked as obsolete or provincial English.
The legal and common meanings share no overlap worth noting except in Webster's 1913, where the smuggling sense is explicitly preserved. The modern Wiktionary entry records an entirely unrelated dialectal meaning — the alder tree — with no connection to the legal term. Researchers encountering "owler" in historical English legal texts should not be misled by any modern dictionary that omits the smuggling sense entirely.
Common Confusion
OWLER and OWLING are paired terms: owling is the offense; an owler is the person committing it. Historical legal dictionaries sometimes treat one without fully defining the other. Researchers should consult the OWLING entry for the statutory and substantive content of the offense; the OWLER entry is the personal designation only.
Why It Matters in Research
Owler is a narrow historical term tied specifically to English wool-smuggling law, most active from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century. The English wool trade was heavily regulated by statute, and unauthorized export — particularly across the Channel to France or the Low Countries — was treated as a serious economic offense against the Crown. The term will appear in pre-nineteenth-century English legal sources, parliamentary records, customs documents, and treatises on trade regulation. It is effectively obsolete in any modern legal context.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on smuggling, customs law, or English mercantile regulation should treat owler as a period-specific personal designation. It will not appear in American legal sources except as a historical reference. The term is absent from most American legal dictionaries, and Bouvier's brief entry signals that even by the mid-nineteenth century it was considered a historical curiosity rather than active doctrine.
The connection to nighttime operations (the "owling" etymology — working by night like an owl) gives the term some color in historical narratives, but it carries no technical legal weight beyond identifying the actor in the offense of owling.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary offers only a single-sentence entry, cross-referencing owling as the substantive term. This is the entirety of the historical legal dictionary record for owler in the Law Mind corpus. Webster's 1913 preserves the smuggling sense and attributes it to T. Brown, consistent with late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century usage. No historical dictionary in the corpus provides a fuller treatment of the owler as a distinct legal category; the substance is entirely in the offense of owling rather than in the personal designation.
Jurisdictional Note
Owler is exclusively an English legal term. It has no recognized equivalent in Scottish, Irish, or American law, and no statutory continuation after the gradual relaxation of wool export restrictions in the nineteenth century.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See OWLING for the substantive offense, its statutory history, and its place in English customs and trade law.