Definition
A defunct writ of English ecclesiastical law that lay to recover tithes — specifically, tithes amounting to one-fourth or more of those belonging to a church — where a party entitled to receive them was wrongfully deprived. The writ's name translates roughly as "advowson of tithes" or "advocacy of tithes," and it operated as a possessory remedy tied to the right of a church or its patron to collect tithe income. It belongs to the broader family of writs governing ecclesiastical property and the relationship between landholders, clergy, and the institutional church in medieval and early modern England.
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Common Confusion
ADVOCATIONE DECIMARUM is easily conflated with two adjacent concepts: advowson (the right to present a clerk to a benefice) and decimis (a separate writ addressing tithe disputes more generally). The advocatione decimarum writ was narrower — it targeted recovery of a specific quantum of tithes (one-fourth or more) rather than the presentment right itself. Researchers who encounter references to advowson writs in historical sources should confirm whether the underlying dispute concerns the right of presentation to a living or the right to receive tithe income, as the applicable writ and the court of competent jurisdiction could differ.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources and is a reliable marker that the document or dispute at hand involves ecclesiastical property law of the medieval or early modern period. Several navigational points are worth noting:
First, the writ is obsolete. It predates the reforms that progressively stripped ecclesiastical courts of tithe jurisdiction and eventually consolidated much of that jurisdiction in secular courts under statutes culminating in the Tithes Act 1836 and later commutation legislation. A researcher encountering this term in a primary source is almost certainly working with material from before the nineteenth century.
Second, the quantum threshold — one-fourth of the tithes belonging to a church — is a technical pleading requirement. If a source references a tithe dispute without this threshold, a different writ or proceeding is likely at issue.
Third, because tithes were tied to local ecclesiastical geography (parishes, rectories, vicarages, and impropriations), documents invoking this writ will frequently intersect with questions about glebe land, appropriation of benefices to monasteries, and post-Dissolution grants to lay improprietors. Researchers working on property records touching former monastic holdings will encounter tithe disputes with particular frequency.
Fourth, the writ belongs to a corpus of Latin-named writs that circulated in English legal practice via Register of Writs collections. Any serious research into the procedural history of the writ should consult the Registrum Brevium tradition alongside the substantive law of tithes.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary surveyed here provide identical, minimal definitions: a writ which lay for tithes demanding the fourth part or upwards that belonged to any church. The entries agree entirely and add no developmental context or procedural detail. Neither source addresses the writ's origins, its relationship to the ecclesiastical court system, or the circumstances of its obsolescence.
What the historical dictionaries do supply — and what earns this entry its place in a research dictionary — is confirmation that even into the American legal dictionary tradition, this writ retained a documentary presence sufficient to warrant inclusion. That said, American researchers would have encountered the term only in English sources; the writ had no transplanted life in the colonies or the early republic, where tithe systems of the English ecclesiastical variety were never established.
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Jurisdictional Note
This writ is exclusively English in origin and application. It has no counterpart in Scots law, Irish ecclesiastical law as developed separately, or any American jurisdiction. Researchers working in Welsh ecclesiastical records should treat it as English law applied, given the union of English and Welsh ecclesiastical administration.
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