William Renwick Riddell was a Canadian jurist and historian active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He served as a judge on the Superior Court of Ontario and contributed scholarly works on the legal and colonial history of Canada. Riddell was recognized for his research on early Canadian documents and for publishing articles in historical societies and academic journals. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and participated in the activities of the Ontario Historical Society.
His publications include studies on the administration of Upper Canada, analyses of early land tenure systems, and edited collections of primary source materials relevant to Canadian legal history. Riddell’s work has been cited in subsequent histories of Ontario’s judicial development and in broader surveys of Canadian historiography.
Details such as his exact dates of birth and death, as well as a comprehensive bibliography, vary among sources and are not uniformly documented in publicly available encyclopedic references. Consequently, while his professional role and contributions are established, precise biographical data remain limited.
