Definition
A term from old common law practice with two distinct historical uses:
1. (Common law vouching) One who called upon another person to warrant or guarantee a title to land — that is, the party who performed the act of vouching. In this sense, the advocator initiated the procedural step of bringing in a third party (the vouchee) to defend the title being claimed. The vouchee, once called upon, was termed the advocatus.
2. (Scots law) An appellant; a party who carried a cause to a higher court by way of advocacy or appeal.
Neither use survives in modern practice. Both meanings belong to procedural contexts that have been abolished or superseded.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who advocates; an advocate.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently defined; treated as a variant or derivative of "advocate."
The common meaning — someone who speaks in favor of a cause or person — overlaps superficially with the legal term but misses the point entirely. In its primary legal sense, an advocator was not a speaker or champion but a procedural actor in the feudal land-title mechanism of vouching to warranty. A researcher encountering "advocator" in an old common law record should resist the instinct to read it as a synonym for counsel or advocate.
Common Confusion
Three related Latin-rooted terms cluster in old practice records and are easily conflated:
- ADVOCATOR: The party who does the vouching — who calls upon another to warrant the title.
- ADVOCATUS (vouchee): The party called upon; the one vouched in to defend.
- ADVOCATE: In modern usage, counsel or legal representative; in Scots and civil law tradition, a member of the bar appearing before a court.
Burrill's entry is the most precise on this point, explicitly distinguishing advocator (the voucher) from advocatus (the vouchee). Black's first and second editions preserve the same distinction but with slightly less clarity. Researchers working with Scots records face an additional layer: in that jurisdiction, advocator meant appellant, not voucher — a meaning unrelated to the English common law usage.
Why It Matters in Research
This term surfaces almost exclusively in medieval and early modern land law records, plea rolls, and treatises on real property procedure. Two research traps are worth flagging:
First, the vouching-to-warranty procedure that gives this term its primary meaning was a feature of the old real actions — forms of action abolished in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and its successors, and never transplanted intact into American practice. Encountering "advocator" in an American legal source is rare; if it appears, it almost certainly signals either a quotation from English authority or an academic treatment of feudal tenure.
Second, the Scots law meaning (appellant) is jurisdictionally isolated. A researcher reading Scottish case reports — particularly older Session Papers or early Brown's Reports — may find "advocator" where an English lawyer would expect "appellant." These are not interchangeable across jurisdictions, and conflating them distorts the procedural posture of the case. Burrill flags the Scots usage with a citation to Brown's Reports; Black's second edition preserves the same citation in garbled form (the typographical errors in that edition's entry for this term are notable and should not be treated as authoritative for the citation itself).
Third, the term has essentially no presence in modern secondary literature or statutory codes. A corpus search will return results concentrated in historical treatises, feudal law commentaries, and Scottish appellate records. Spelman's Glossarium and Townshend's Treatise on Pleas are the foundational primary sources underlying every historical dictionary entry on this term.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core English common law definition: advocator equals voucher, the party who calls upon another to warrant title. The formulation is nearly identical across Black's first edition, Black's second edition, and Burrill, all tracing to the same two authorities — Spelman and Townshend.
Burrill adds the most value by also capturing the Scots law meaning (appellant, citing Brown's Reports) and by providing the Latin derivation from advocare, which connects this term to the broader family of advocacy-related terms in civil and canon law. Black's second edition includes the Scots usage but the citation is typographically corrupted, making Burrill the more reliable source for that line of authority.
What all three historical dictionaries omit: any discussion of how vouching to warranty actually functioned procedurally, what triggered the right to vouch, or how the advocator's role differed from that of a guarantor in a modern transactional sense. Researchers needing that context must go to the underlying treatises or to Coke on Littleton.
Jurisdictional Note
The English common law meaning (voucher in land title warranty) never took hold as operative procedure in American jurisdictions, where the old real actions were largely bypassed from the outset. The Scots meaning (appellant) is confined to Scottish practice and Scottish case reporters. Neither meaning has modern domestic application in U.S. or contemporary English courts.