Definition
A term appearing in early English statutes to denote a class of criminals or thieves associated with violent disorder, robbery, and felony. The word appears almost exclusively in medieval penal legislation, where it names a recognized category of lawless persons alongside similar designations such as "Roberdsmen" and "Drawlatches." As a legal term, wastors had no technical doctrinal content — it did not define elements of an offense or a cause of action — but rather served as a statutory label identifying a type of chronic offender whose activities the crown sought to suppress by name.
Why It Matters in Research
Wastors is a relic term, useful almost exclusively to researchers working in medieval English legal history, early statutory construction, or the history of criminal classification. It will not appear in modern case law or contemporary legal materials.
The primary research value of the term is its function as a marker in early English penal statutes. Researchers tracing the legislative history of vagrancy law, riot suppression, or the origins of criminal typology in English law will encounter the term in statutes from the reigns of Edward III and Henry IV. The pairing of "Roberdsmen, Wastors, and Drawlatches" in those statutes reflects a medieval legislative habit of naming criminal classes by common or argot designation rather than by conduct-based definition — a pattern that contrasts sharply with later common law and modern statutory drafting.
Researchers should be alert to the following: the term does not appear to have generated judicial interpretation in the reported cases. It functioned descriptively, not analytically. Courts did not define its elements, and the term was not transplanted into equity or common law pleading. Its appearance in legal dictionaries is essentially antiquarian — preserving the statutory language rather than recording a living legal concept.
The connection to Lord Hale noted by Rapalje & Lawrence, via Lyon v. Fishmongers' Co., is worth investigating for researchers interested in how historical statutory language was occasionally invoked in later common law arguments, though the Severn river context there is distinct from the criminal typology use.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement: wastors denotes a kind of thieves named in old statutes. Black's (both editions) and Burrill are nearly identical in their treatment, with Burrill providing the most useful primary statutory grounding. The passage Burrill quotes — "There have been divers manslaughters, felonies and robberies, done by people called Roberdsmen, Wastors, and Drawlatches" — is drawn from Stat. 4 Hen. IV c. 27 and Stat. 5 Edw. III c. 14, and is the closest any of the sources comes to a primary definition by context.
Rapalje & Lawrence add a suggestive but underdeveloped note connecting the term to Lord Hale and the Lyon v. Fishmongers' Co. line, without explaining the connection in full. This may reflect a secondary use of the term in riparian or franchise law contexts, or simply an editorial proximity artifact in the original source. Researchers should treat that connection with caution and verify the citation directly.
None of the historical dictionaries attempt to distinguish wastors from the companion terms Roberdsmen or Drawlatches, nor do they address whether the three terms had distinct meanings in practice or were used interchangeably as rhetorical intensifiers in the statutory preambles. That question remains open in the secondary literature on medieval English criminal law.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: any analysis of whether the term derived from the verb "to waste" (with connotations of destruction or squandering) or from an unrelated root, and whether the statutory use reflected a recognized social category or was essentially a term of condemnation. These questions belong more to legal history than to the dictionary tradition, but researchers should not assume the dictionaries have exhausted the interpretive possibilities.