Definition
Redubbours (also spelled redoubours; Latin: redobatores) is an archaic term from old English law referring to persons who knowingly purchased stolen clothing or cloth and then altered it in form — cutting, dyeing, resewing, or otherwise transforming it — to conceal its origins and prevent identification by the rightful owner. The offense combined the elements of receiving stolen goods with the active concealment of their identity through physical transformation.
The term captures a specific category of offender distinct from a mere receiver of stolen property: the redubbour did not simply hold or resell the stolen goods but took deliberate steps to disguise them, making recovery or identification by the victim substantially more difficult.
Why It Matters in Research
Redubbours is a highly specialized term of medieval English law that will appear almost exclusively in early legal treatises and antiquarian legal dictionaries. Researchers encountering it in primary sources — particularly in Britton or texts deriving from that tradition — should understand it as a forerunner to the modern crime of receiving stolen goods, with the added element of concealment by alteration.
The term is notable for what it reveals about early common law's treatment of property crimes: medieval law recognized that active transformation of stolen goods warranted distinct treatment from passive receipt. This conceptual distinction — between receiving and concealing — threads forward into later doctrines of accessory liability and, eventually, into modern statutes criminalizing the concealment or disposal of stolen property.
Researchers working in the history of theft, receiving, and fencing offenses should treat redubbours as an early data point in the evolution of what became, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a more generalized law of receiving stolen goods. The term will not appear in modern legal sources; its utility is confined to medieval and early modern legal history.
Cross-reference with redobatores (the Latinized form) when searching Latin-language records and registers. Some sources render the term in slightly varied spellings; Burrill's citation to Britton (c. 29) is the primary textual anchor.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only significant treatment of this term among standard legal dictionaries, defining redubbours as persons "who knowingly bought stolen clothes, and changed them into another form," citing Britton (chapter 29) and Cowell's Interpreter. The quoted Old French source phrase — "achatauntz ascient dras embles, et les attirent en auter forme" — translates roughly as "buyers knowing of stolen cloths, and altering them into another form," and is characteristic of Britton's Anglo-French legal text.
Cowell's Interpreter, an early seventeenth-century legal dictionary, serves as an intermediate source between Britton's medieval text and Burrill's nineteenth-century compilation, suggesting the term retained enough relevance across several centuries to warrant dictionary treatment even as its operational legal significance faded.
No substantive treatment of redubbours appears in later major English legal dictionaries such as those of Tomlin, Jowitt, or Stroud, consistent with the term's obsolescence by the modern period. What historical dictionaries collectively miss is any analysis of how this specific offense was prosecuted, what penalties attached, or how it related procedurally to the broader category of larceny-adjacent offenses in medieval courts. The surviving record through dictionary sources is definitional only.
Jurisdictional Note
Redubbours is a term of old English law with no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It has no modern legal application in any jurisdiction and is relevant solely to the study of medieval English legal history and the history of property crime.