Definition
In legal and historical usage, a stole is a robe or garment of honour, typically associated with ceremonial office or ecclesiastical vestiture. Bouvier cites Jacob's Law Dictionary for the proposition that a stole is a robe of honour, and the term appears in English law primarily in connection with the office of Groom of the Stole — a senior court position in the English royal household. The term carries no independent legal doctrine; its legal significance is exclusively ceremonial and historical, tied to the dignities and offices of the English Crown.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simple past and past participle of the verb "steal" — as in, "he stole the watch."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The imperfect (simple past) tense of "steal."
The gap here is total and potentially misleading. A researcher encountering "stole" in a historical legal source must immediately determine whether the term refers to the verb form of "steal" — relevant to criminal law, larceny, or property — or to the noun denoting a ceremonial garment or office. Context will almost always resolve the ambiguity, but the collision of a common verb form with a specialized legal noun is a genuine indexing and search trap in historical corpus work.
Common Confusion
The noun "stole" (robe of honour; court office) and the verb "stole" (past tense of steal) are orthographically identical. In digitized historical legal texts, full-text search for "stole" will return results from both categories indiscriminately. A search targeting larceny or theft doctrine will surface entries about royal household offices, and vice versa. Researchers should apply proximity filters or contextual qualifiers when running corpus searches on this term.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of "stole" as a legal noun is its gateway function to the office of Groom of the Stole, a position of genuine constitutional and historical interest in English royal household law. Bouvier treats it briefly and redirects to that entry; the substantive content lives there, not under this headword.
For researchers working in criminal law history — particularly larceny, theft, or receiving stolen goods — the verb "stole" will appear throughout case law and statutes, but it functions there purely as ordinary language, not as a term of art. No special legal meaning attaches to the verb form.
The search problem is the real hazard: automated corpus tools will not distinguish the noun from the verb. Researchers querying historical legal databases should be aware that hits for "stole" may require manual triage to separate ceremonial-office references from criminal law contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary entry is minimal — a single line identifying "stole" as a robe of honour, citing Jacob, and cross-referencing the Groom of the Stole entry. This reflects the term's narrow and derivative standing in American legal lexicography: Bouvier includes it as a bridge entry rather than a substantive definition. The substantive historical treatment of the office and its ceremonial garments belongs to English constitutional history and is better developed in sources focused on the royal household. No divergence among historical dictionaries is worth noting here; the term is simply too thin a headword to generate competing treatments.
Jurisdictional Note
The legal meaning of "stole" as a robe of honour or marker of ceremonial office is exclusively English in origin and has no counterpart in American law. It appears in American legal dictionaries only because Bouvier and his predecessors drew heavily on English sources. Researchers working in U.S. legal contexts will not encounter the noun form in operative legal documents.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: GROOM OF THE STOLE