Definition
An Anglo-Norman (Law French) term denoting the office or function of an advocate, or advocacy as a professional activity. The term is not used in modern legal practice and survives only in historical legal sources as a label for the role and duties of one who pleads on behalf of another before a tribunal or court.
Common Confusion
Advocassie should not be confused with advowson, a distinct Law French-derived term referring to the right of presenting a nominee to a vacant ecclesiastical benefice. The visual and phonetic proximity of Law French terms beginning with advo- has occasionally led to transcription and indexing errors in older manuscript and print sources. Researchers searching digitized historical corpora should verify that hits for advocassie are not misreadings or OCR artifacts of advowson or related terms.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it exclusively in historical texts drawing on Law French, the Norman-derived legal idiom that dominated English legal writing and pleading from the medieval period through the seventeenth century. The term has no operational significance in modern doctrine but serves as a pointer: when it appears in a source, it signals that the surrounding text is engaging with older procedural or professional vocabulary, and the researcher should be attentive to whether the substantive concept being described maps cleanly onto the modern office of attorney, barrister, or advocate—categories that were not always cleanly distinguished in the sources where advocassie appears. The attribution to Kelham (Robert Kelham's Glossary of Law French terms, 1779) in both Burrill and the second edition of Black's places the term within a specific lexicographic tradition; researchers citing this word should trace the chain back to Kelham rather than treating Black's as the primary authority.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in close agreement: advocassie means the office of an advocate or, more abstractly, advocacy itself. Black's first edition gives a compressed gloss ("an advocate; advocacy"), while the second edition and Burrill are marginally more precise in identifying it as "the office of an advocate." The difference is minor but worth noting: the office framing emphasizes a recognized professional or institutional role, not merely the act of speaking on another's behalf. Burrill's citation to Kelham is the key bibliographic anchor and is reproduced in Black's second edition. None of the three dictionaries provides illustrative quotation or historical case context, which limits their usefulness beyond confirming the term's existence and basic meaning. No modern edition of Black's carries the entry, reflecting the term's complete disappearance from living legal vocabulary.