Definition
Voidance has two related senses in legal usage:
1. (Ecclesiastical law) The condition or act by which a benefice — a church office carrying an income — becomes vacant, whether through the death, resignation, deprivation, or removal of its incumbent. Voidance describes both the event that creates the vacancy and the state of vacancy itself.
2. (General legal usage, now rare) The act of voiding or annulling something; the process by which an instrument, proceeding, or right is emptied of legal effect. In this sense, voidance overlaps with avoidance and nullification, though it appears infrequently in modern legal writing.
The ecclesiastical sense is the historically dominant legal meaning and the one most likely encountered in pre-twentieth-century sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of voiding — specifically, of defecating or removing — and the quality of being void.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of voiding, emptying, ejecting, or evacuating; ejection from a benefice; the state of being void or vacant; evasion or subterfuge (marked obsolete).
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. Modern ordinary usage has collapsed toward the physiological sense (evacuation of the body), which is remote from the legal meaning. A researcher encountering "voidance" in an ecclesiastical law context must resist the pull of both modern common usage and the broader Webster's sense of mere emptying; the legal term carries a precise, institutional meaning tied to church office and the rules governing clerical succession.
Common Confusion
Voidance is easily confused with avoidance. In both historical and modern sources, avoidance is the far more common term for the vacancy of a benefice, and the two were sometimes used interchangeably. Avoidance in ecclesiastical law refers to the same condition — a benefice without an incumbent — and triggered the patron's right of presentation. Researchers should search both terms when working through ecclesiastical records or disputes over advowsons. Outside ecclesiastical law, avoidance also carries contract law meaning (the act of escaping or rendering void a voidable instrument), which has no counterpart in the narrower term voidance. Do not conflate voidance with voidability, which describes a defeasible legal status rather than the act or event of becoming void.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter voidance in three contexts: disputes over advowsons and rights of presentation in English ecclesiastical and common law records; treatises on church law written before the twentieth century; and secondary sources discussing the rules of lapse, where a patron's failure to present after a voidance within a prescribed time transferred the right of presentation to the bishop or crown.
The term drops sharply from legal usage after the disestablishment debates of the nineteenth century and the reorganization of church law. Modern American legal sources rarely use it at all; its natural habitat is English law before 1900. Searching only for "vacancy" or "avoidance" in historical sources risks missing passages that use "voidance" as the operative term.
The cross-reference to advowson is essential: voidance is the triggering event that activated the patron's right of presentation. Understanding voidance is therefore a prerequisite to understanding the litigation sequence in advowson cases — voidance, presentation, institution, and induction form a chain that generated substantial medieval and early modern litigation in the English courts.
Burrill's entry ties voidance to the Latin vacatio, which is useful for researchers working with Latin ecclesiastical records or early Year Books. The term voier appearing immediately after in Burrill is unrelated — an artifact of alphabetical proximity, not substantive connection.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence align closely: both define voidance simply as the act of emptying and ejection from a benefice, with Black's citing 10 Paige Ch. 445 (a New York chancery report) as authority — an unusual citation for an English ecclesiastical term, suggesting the concept appeared in American equity practice in limited contexts, likely concerning charitable or church property. Burrill takes a slightly different angle, emphasizing the condition of want of an incumbent (citing Cowell's legal lexicon) rather than the act, which corresponds to the distinction between voidance-as-event and voidance-as-state noted in Webster's 1913.
None of the three historical dictionaries address the broader sense of voidance as a synonym for annulment or nullification, which appears to have been a secondary usage that never achieved firm doctrinal footing. Webster's 1913 flags "evasion; subterfuge" as an obsolete sense sourced to Bacon — this usage is not recognized in the legal dictionaries and should not be imported into legal research contexts.
The historical sources collectively give a thinner treatment than the term's importance in ecclesiastical law warrants. Researchers needing depth should look beyond dictionary entries to treatises on advowsons, the writ of quare impedit, and canon law commentaries.
Jurisdictional Note
Voidance as a technical term is essentially a feature of English ecclesiastical law and its reception in jurisdictions that adopted Church of England structures. American legal usage is sparse and largely confined to states with significant early Anglican institutional history; the New York chancery citation in Black's is an outlier. Researchers working in American jurisdictions should not expect the term to carry consistent technical meaning outside of historical church property disputes.