Definition
In English legal history, owlers were persons who smuggled wool or sheep to the coast under cover of darkness for illegal export. The practice involved transporting contraband by night — typically wool and sometimes live sheep — to coastal landing points where it could be loaded onto ships and carried out of England without payment of customs duties or in defiance of outright export prohibitions. The term denotes both the individual smuggler and, collectively, those engaged in this particular form of coastal contraband trade.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of owler — no substantive modern definition beyond the historical legal sense.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded as a common English word in Webster's 1913.
The term has no meaningful life outside the legal and historical record. The name is generally understood to derive from the owl — a creature of nocturnal activity — reflecting the night-bound character of the trade. It is functional jargon, not general vocabulary.
Why It Matters in Research
OWLERS is a term of almost entirely historical significance, relevant to researchers working in English legal history, customs law, and the early development of smuggling prohibitions. Several research traps apply.
First, temporal specificity matters sharply. The owling trade was a particular problem in England from roughly the mid-fourteenth century through the early eighteenth century, when prohibitions on wool export and the wool staple system made domestic wool enormously valuable on Continental markets. Researchers encountering the term in primary sources should situate it within this export-control framework, not within general smuggling law.
Second, owling must be distinguished from smuggling in the broader modern sense. Owling specifically targeted outbound contraband — wool and sheep leaving England — whereas the smuggling more commonly discussed in later legal history involved inbound goods (tea, brandy, lace) evading import duties. Conflating the two distorts the legal and economic context.
Third, the statutory background is dense and layered. English parliaments passed repeated acts from Edward III onward regulating wool export, the staple system, and the licensing of wool merchants. Later statutes, including provisions in the reigns of Charles II and William III, specifically addressed owling as a distinct offense with its own penalties. Researchers using this term as a search anchor in corpus materials should expect to find it in customs and excise contexts, parliamentary debates, and treatises on revenue law rather than in common law criminal sources.
Fourth, the term largely disappears from legal literature after the early eighteenth century. The restructuring of English wool trade policy, the decline of the staple system, and the eventual relaxation of wool export restrictions reduced owling as a distinct legal category. Post-1750 sources are unlikely to use the term in operative legal contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary reproduce the entry identically and attribute it to Jacob — a reference to Giles Jacob's Law Dictionary, an influential eighteenth-century English legal reference work. This identical reproduction across editions signals that Black's treated the term as settled historical record requiring no updating, which is accurate: owling ceased to be a living legal category before American law developed its own independent tradition. Neither edition elaborates on the statutory framework, the penalties, or the distinction from other customs offenses. Researchers should not expect Black's entries here to serve as anything more than a pointer to the English legal historical record. The Jacob attribution is useful as a provenance marker; Jacob's dictionary in turn reflects the term's established usage in English customs administration.
Jurisdictional Note
Owlers and the offense of owling are exclusively English legal concepts with no counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. The term will not appear in operative American legal materials. Researchers in comparative legal history may find analogous coastal smuggling offenses in other wool-producing jurisdictions, but the term itself does not travel.