Definition
Quare impedit (Latin: "wherefore he hinders") is a common-law writ and action used in English law to enforce a disputed right of presentation to a church living, known as an advowson. When a patron — the person or institution holding the right to nominate a candidate for appointment to a benefice — was prevented from exercising that right, whether by a competing claimant or by the bishop refusing to accept the nominated candidate, the patron could bring a quare impedit action to compel the disturber to answer why he hinders the plaintiff's exercise of that right.
The writ names the disturber and demands a legal accounting of the obstruction. Relief could include restoration of the right of presentation and, where six months had elapsed without presentation, an order for the bishop to fill the vacancy by lapse.
Common Confusion
Quare impedit is the primary action for disputed advowsons, but researchers will encounter related writs in historical sources: darrein presentment (an assize testing who last presented to the living) and jus patronatus (an ecclesiastical proceeding in the church courts). Quare impedit is a royal common-law action, triable in the secular courts, not an ecclesiastical remedy — a distinction that mattered enormously in the jurisdictional rivalry between common-law courts and the Church of England. Do not conflate quare impedit with quare non admittit, a distinct writ compelling a bishop to admit a presented clerk, though the two were sometimes used in sequence.
Core Elements
To maintain a quare impedit action, the plaintiff patron needed to establish:
1. Existence of the advowson. The plaintiff held a recognized right of patronage — the legal entitlement to nominate a clerk to a vacant benefice.
2. A vacancy. The living was actually vacant, triggering the right to present.
3. Disturbance. A specific person or institution actively hindered the exercise of that right, whether a rival claimant presenting another candidate, or a bishop refusing the patron's nominee without lawful cause.
4. Timely action. Because after six months a vacancy could pass to the bishop by lapse, and then successively to the archbishop and the Crown, the action carried an inherent urgency that shaped both pleading and procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
Quare impedit entries appear throughout English legal history from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, but their practical importance collapsed with the secularization of English ecclesiastical patronage law in the late Victorian era. Researchers working in pre-1900 English legal materials — Year Books, plea rolls, Blackstone, and the old form books — will encounter this writ frequently. Those working in modern sources will find it almost exclusively as a historical artifact.
Several navigational traps arise. First, advowson law is heavily intertwined with ecclesiastical records, but quare impedit itself was a proceeding in the secular common-law courts. Researchers must look in the right court records: King's Bench and Common Pleas, not the church court archives, for the writ itself. Second, the lapse doctrine means that the passage of time within a single litigation could change the nature of relief available — a feature of quare impedit that generated substantial procedural law of its own. Third, the right of advowson could be held in gross, appendant to a manor, or appropriated to a religious house; the form of the right affected who had standing to bring the writ, and pre-Reformation materials dealing with monastic advowsons require particular care. Fourth, following the English Reformation, advowson law evolved as church patronage was redistributed, and researchers will find the writ appearing in post-Reformation disputes that reflect that redistribution. American researchers will find quare impedit of minimal direct relevance — the separation of church and state eliminated advowson law as a live doctrine — but it surfaces in historical discussions of property rights in ecclesiastical livings and occasionally in early colonial materials from jurisdictions with established churches.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries converge on the essentials: quare impedit lies for the patron of an advowson disturbed in the right of patronage, and the writ's name derives from the formula summoning the defendant to answer "wherefore he hinders." Both editions of Black's cite Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 246, 248) as the authoritative reference, which remains the most accessible systematic treatment of the writ's structure and history. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry, though incomplete in the source material provided, adds the important practical point that the action enforces the right to present to a benefice — emphasizing the enforcement function rather than merely the defensive, disturbed-right framing of Black's.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the procedural urgency created by the six-month lapse rule and the layered succession of lapse (patron to bishop to archbishop to Crown), which was central to how the action was actually litigated. Blackstone himself treats this in detail, and researchers should consult the Commentaries directly rather than relying on dictionary summaries for procedural nuance.
Jurisdictional Note
Quare impedit is exclusively English in origin and application. Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies each developed different legal treatments of ecclesiastical patronage, and the writ in its common-law form did not transplant into American law. Researchers encountering the term in American materials before 1800 are almost certainly looking at English authorities being cited for analogy, not live American doctrine.