Definition
A redisseisor is a person who commits a second disseisin — that is, one who wrongfully dispossesses a landowner of seisin after that landowner has already been restored to possession following an earlier disseisin. The term compounds the root offense: where a disseisor is one who unlawfully ousts another from possession of freehold land, a redisseisor does so again, against the same person, after recovery. The repeated character of the wrong distinguished the redisseisor at common law and attracted enhanced legal consequences.
Common Confusion
REDISSEISOR / DISSEISOR: A disseisor commits the original wrongful dispossession. A redisseisor commits a subsequent wrongful dispossession against the same party already once wronged and restored. The distinction matters in historical pleading and in the application of the Statute of Winchester and related legislation targeting persistent or repeated dispossessors. Researchers who encounter "disseisor" in older records should not assume it subsumes the aggravated redisseisor category without confirming context.
REDISSEISOR / REDISSEIZOR: These are spelling variants of the same term. Wiktionary treats "redisseisor" as an alternative form of "redisseizor." Both spellings appear in historical English legal sources; neither carries a distinct legal meaning. Researchers should search for both forms when working with historical records and manuscript sources.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the technical vocabulary of medieval and early modern English land law and will appear almost exclusively in historical sources — plea rolls, Year Books, treatises on real property, and legislation from the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries. It has no meaningful modern common-law survival as an operative legal category.
The primary research trap is treating Bouvier's cross-reference ("See DISSEISIN") as an adequate stopping point. Bouvier's entry for REDISSEISOR directs researchers to DISSEISIN without elaborating, which means the substance must be reconstructed from the disseisin entry and from older authorities — Bracton, Littleton, Coke on Littleton, and the Statute of Marlborough (1267) and related statutes — rather than from the dictionary itself.
A second trap concerns statutory context. The repeated dispossessor was treated with particular severity in medieval English law. The Statute of Winchester (1285) and earlier measures addressed the problem of forcible and repeated disseisins; researchers working on land disputes in that era should trace whether "redisseisor" appears in a purely common-law pleading context or in connection with statutory penalties for aggravated or forcible dispossession.
The spelling variation (redisseisor / redisseizor) creates search gaps in digitized historical corpora. Run both forms. Manuscript sources may use neither consistently.
Because the term's operative significance is bound to the doctrine of seisin — the feudal concept of possessory entitlement to freehold land — researchers unfamiliar with seisin will need to work through that foundational concept before the redisseisor category becomes coherent. The Law Mind Encyclopedia entries on DISSEISIN and SEISIN are the necessary starting points.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary does not provide a standalone entry for REDISSEISOR beyond a bare cross-reference to DISSEISIN. This is itself informative: by the time of Bouvier's principal editions (mid-to-late nineteenth century), the term had receded sufficiently from active practice that extended treatment was unnecessary. The cross-reference confirms the term's authenticity and its subordinate relationship to disseisin doctrine, but nothing more.
Older common-law authorities supply the substance Bouvier omits. Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae treats repeated disseisin as an aggravated form of the original wrong. Coke's commentary on Littleton engages the finer distinctions of disseisin and its variants. Researchers who need doctrinal depth should go to those primary sources rather than relying on any dictionary treatment.
No meaningful divergence appears across historical dictionary sources for this term, principally because so few dictionaries give it independent treatment. The absence of extended coverage is itself the signal: this is a term of pleading art, more at home in the Year Books and on plea rolls than in general legal reference works.
Jurisdictional Note
REDISSEISOR is a term of English common law origin and has no equivalent statutory or doctrinal life in modern American, Canadian, or Australian jurisdictions as an operative legal category. It may appear in American colonial-era land records or early state court records that carried over English real property pleading forms, but researchers encountering it in post-eighteenth-century American sources should treat that as a historical artifact rather than evidence of continuing legal significance.