Definition
The criminal offense under English law of transporting wool or sheep out of the kingdom without authorization. Owling was a form of smuggling specific to England's wool trade, developed when Parliament imposed statutory prohibitions on the export of raw wool and live sheep in order to protect domestic textile manufacturing and control the wool trade. The offense was typically committed at night to avoid detection, giving rise to its distinctive name.
Owling is now a purely historical offense. It was abolished by statute — Burrill notes it ceased to be an offense under 5 Geo. (the relevant statute of George III's reign) — and has no modern operational significance in English or any other legal system.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Birding activity focused on catching or observing owls; also a social-media trend involving crouching in an unusual location to be photographed.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The offense of transporting wool or sheep out of England contrary to the statute formerly existing."
Editorial note: Webster's 1913 treats the word as a legal term first, reflecting how thoroughly the legal meaning dominated the word's usage through the nineteenth century. The modern common meaning — owl-watching or the "planking" variant — bears no relationship to the legal sense. A researcher encountering "owling" in a historical English legal text should immediately discount any ornithological or colloquial reading.
Why It Matters in Research
Owling is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in historical English legal materials, particularly in commentary on customs and revenue law from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. A few navigation points:
Period of relevance: The wool export prohibitions that created the offense date primarily to the Plantagenet and Tudor eras and were reinforced through the seventeenth century. Researchers working in English statutory history or mercantile regulation will find owling discussed in that context. By the early nineteenth century, the statutory basis had been repealed and the term was already archaic.
Blackstone as the key source: Every historical dictionary entry in the Law Mind corpus traces directly to 4 Blackstone's Commentaries 154. Blackstone's treatment is the standard reference point. Any further research into the offense should begin there rather than in the dictionary sources themselves, which are all derivative.
Relationship to smuggling law: Owling sits within the broader category of English customs and revenue offenses. Researchers tracing the history of smuggling law or the development of excise enforcement should note that owling was treated as a distinct statutory offense rather than a species of common-law smuggling. This distinction may affect how it appears in historical indictments or court records.
No American law relevance: The offense has no counterpart in American law. The United States has never imposed analogous prohibitions on agricultural exports of this kind. Researchers encountering the term in American legal sources are almost certainly encountering a quotation from or reference to Blackstone.
Corpus trap — modern search terms: Because "owling" has acquired entirely unrelated modern meanings (birding, social media trends), keyword searches in mixed historical-and-modern databases will return substantial noise. Filter aggressively by date and source type when searching.
Historical Dictionary Support
The Law Mind historical sources — Black's (both editions), Bouvier, and Burrill — are in complete agreement on substance. All four define owling identically as the offense of transporting wool or sheep out of the kingdom, and all attribute the name to the nocturnal character of the offense. The uniformity is unsurprising because all four entries derive from the same single source: Blackstone's Commentaries.
Bouvier adds a small flourish — noting that the name "is said to owe its origin to the fact that this offence was carried on in the night, when the owl was abroad" — which reads as editorial color rather than independent research. Black's (both editions) and Burrill stick closer to Blackstone's phrasing without elaboration.
The most substantively useful entry is Burrill's, which is the only historical source in the corpus to note that the offense has been abolished ("Now no offence. Stat. 5 Geo."). Black's and Bouvier leave the reader to infer the offense's current status from context. Researchers relying solely on Black's without Burrill's note might not immediately recognize that owling carries no continuing legal force.
What the historical sources collectively miss: none of them situate owling within the broader history of England's wool trade regulation, the Navigation Acts, or the economic protectionism that gave rise to the prohibition. A researcher wanting that context must go beyond the dictionary shelf entirely.
Jurisdictional Note
Owling was purely an offense of English law. It has no equivalent in Scottish law, Irish law, or American law, and it was abolished in England by the early nineteenth century. Any modern jurisdictional analysis is inapplicable.