Definition
A Law Latin term used in old common law pleading to mean "advantage." The term appears in formal pleading documents and procedural entries from the early English common law tradition, where Latin was the standard language of the courts. It carries no independent legal meaning beyond its literal translation; its significance is entirely contextual — appearing in pleadings to assert that a party holds some procedural, contractual, or possessory advantage relevant to the matter at hand.
Why It Matters in Research
ADVANTAGIUM is a specimen term: its research value lies not in doctrine but in decoding historical documents. Researchers working with pre-modern English court records, plea rolls, or printed entries books will encounter it as a standard Latin placeholder for "advantage" in the formal pleading registers. The citations appearing consistently across the historical dictionaries — Coke's Entries (Co. Ent. 484) and Townshend's Pleadings (Townsh. Pl. 50) — point directly to the entries books and pleading form collections where the term appears in situ. Researchers who encounter ADVANTAGIUM in a transcribed plea or procedural record and cannot find it in modern legal glossaries should understand that it is not a term of art with substantive legal content; it is Latin drafting convention.
Because Latin pleading was abolished in English courts by statute in the eighteenth century (4 Geo. 2, c. 26, 1731), this term will not appear in any modern pleading. Its occurrence in a document is itself a dating clue: presence of ADVANTAGIUM in pleading form is consistent with pre-1733 English practice. American colonial courts followed English pleading conventions to varying degrees, so researchers in early American records may also encounter it, though less frequently.
There is no meaningful jurisdictional variation to track for this term — it is a fossil of a uniform Latin pleading tradition that predates the divergence of common law systems across jurisdictions.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree completely: ADVANTAGIUM means "advantage" in old pleading, and all three cite the same two authorities — Coke's Entries at page 484 and Townshend's Pleadings at page 50. This uniformity across Black's (both editions) and Burrill's signals that the term was settled and uncontroversial even among legal lexicographers working at different periods. None of the dictionaries attempt to elaborate on doctrine or context, which is itself informative: this was a term of form, not of substance.
Burrill's prefixes the entry with "L. Lat." — an abbreviation for Law Latin — which is the correct technical characterization. The distinction between Law Latin and classical Latin matters in legal historical research: Law Latin was a specialized, often debased or anglicized form of Latin used in English legal proceedings, not classical Roman usage. Researchers should be aware that other Law Latin terms may not translate cleanly into classical Latin equivalents.
No historical dictionary source flags any divergence in meaning, any jurisdictional variation, or any evolution of the term over time. This is consistent with its purely formal, translational character.