Definition
A historical placeholder name used in the fiction of ejectment actions to identify the casual ejector — the fictitious defendant who, by the conventions of the old common law action of ejectment, was served with notice of the suit and whose nominal role in the proceeding gave the real defendant an opportunity to appear and defend title. Rapalje & Lawrence identify "Troublesome" as this fictitious character, whose services, like those of the casual ejector generally, are no longer invoked in modern practice.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Causing trouble or anxiety.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Giving trouble or anxiety; vexatious; burdensome; wearisome.
The ordinary meaning of "troublesome" carries no legal significance whatsoever. The legal use is a proper name — a term of art drawn from the elaborate fiction of the old action of ejectment — and has nothing to do with the adjective's common sense of being difficult or vexing. A researcher encountering "Troublesome" in a historical pleading or legal dictionary is looking at a character name, not a descriptive term.
Common Confusion
"Troublesome" as a legal term is easily overlooked precisely because it looks like an ordinary adjective. Researchers skimming historical pleadings, dictionaries, or treatise discussions of ejectment may read past it without recognizing it as the name of the fictitious casual ejector. It should not be confused with William Stiles, the other conventional fictitious name sometimes used for the casual ejector, nor with Richard Roe or John Doe, who occupied different roles in the same fictional apparatus. The names used in ejectment fictions were not fixed universally; "Troublesome" appears as a variant name in certain formulations.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law materials, colonial American pleading records, or treatises on real property and ejectment may encounter "Troublesome" without any explanatory context. Because the term looks like a descriptor rather than a name, it creates a genuine reading trap in historical sources.
The action of ejectment depended on an elaborate legal fiction: a fictional lessee (commonly John Doe) brought suit against a fictional ejector (sometimes named Troublesome or William Stiles), and the letter from the casual ejector to the real tenant in possession — advising him to appear and defend — was the mechanism by which the actual title dispute came before the court. Once the real defendant appeared, the fictitious parties receded into the background of the pleadings but remained nominally present in the record.
Because this fiction was abolished by statute in England and replaced by reformed ejectment procedures, and because American jurisdictions moved away from the common law fiction at varying points (many through mid-nineteenth-century procedural reforms and the Field Code), "Troublesome" as a legal term belongs almost entirely to the pre-reform period. Post-reform sources will not use it. Researchers tracing ejectment procedure across the reform era should expect the term to disappear from practice materials after the relevant procedural reform in the jurisdiction under study.
The connection to John Doe entries in the same dictionary is direct: Rapalje & Lawrence cross-reference "Troublesome" to both John Doe and the general Ejectment entry, signaling that the term only makes sense within that cluster of fictions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the only dictionary treatment located in the Law Mind corpus. Their entry is brief — identifying Troublesome as the casual ejector and fictitious defendant in ejectment, noting that his services are no longer invoked, and cross-referencing John Doe and Ejectment. This economy of treatment reflects the term's status by the time the dictionary was compiled: a historical curiosity rather than a live term of practice.
No other historical legal dictionary in the corpus appears to carry a standalone entry for "Troublesome" as a legal term. Its appearance in Rapalje & Lawrence is itself evidence that the compilers were cataloguing the vocabulary of the old forms for the benefit of practitioners and scholars who might encounter it in historical records, not for practitioners who would use it in current pleadings.
Jurisdictional Note
"Troublesome" as a legal term is confined to jurisdictions that practiced the common law action of ejectment in its fictitious form — primarily England and the American colonies and early states. Reform-era procedural codes eliminated the fiction and with it the need for the name. The term has no application in civil law jurisdictions or in any modern pleading context.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See EJECTMENT for the full procedural framework within which this term operated. See JOHN DOE for the parallel treatment of fictitious plaintiff names in the same action.