Definition
An advoutrer is an archaic legal term for an adulterer — specifically, a person who commits adultery. The term appears in old English law and is preserved primarily in historical legal materials. It has no operative modern legal meaning and functions today only as a period-accurate label encountered in early common law texts, ecclesiastical court records, and historical statutes.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An adulterer.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An adulterer. [Obs.]
The common and legal meanings are identical. However, while ordinary usage treats advoutrer as simply a synonym for adulterer, the legal usage carried specific jurisdictional weight — an advoutrer was a party subject to ecclesiastical court process and, derivatively, to common law consequences affecting property and marital rights. The word in a legal document is not merely descriptive; it is a term of pleading that invoked a recognized legal status.
Common Confusion
Advoutrer should not be confused with the related noun advoutry (also spelled advowtry or adultry in period sources), which names the act rather than the person. Similarly, avowterer appears as a variant spelling in some sources. These are not distinct legal concepts — they are spelling variations common in pre-standardized legal English. Researchers searching historical corpora should use truncated or wildcard search strategies to capture the full range of spellings.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English legal materials: ecclesiastical court proceedings, early common law pleadings, and statutes addressing moral offenses. It signals that the surrounding document likely concerns adultery as a cognizable legal wrong — which carried consequences ranging from ecclesiastical censure to property and inheritance consequences under early English law.
The term is a navigational marker, not a term of art with distinct legal elements. When you see advoutrer in a source, look to the surrounding procedural context: ecclesiastical jurisdiction handled adultery as a spiritual offense, while common law courts addressed collateral consequences (such as the husband's action for criminal conversation or loss of dower rights). The term itself does not tell you which forum you are in, so context is essential.
Researchers working in American legal history may encounter the term in early South Carolina or other colonial-era records that tracked English ecclesiastical usage. The Black's citation to Beaty v. Richardson (S.C. 1899) is a rare American instance and is notable primarily for its antiquarian use of the term in a late-nineteenth-century opinion — itself a signal that the court was invoking historical English law.
Do not expect this term in any modern statute, code, or case. Its presence in a document is itself a dating and jurisdictional clue.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines advoutrer simply as "an adulterer" under old English law, with the single citation to Beaty v. Richardson. The entry is minimal, as expected for a term that had already become obsolete by the time Black's was compiled. Webster's 1913 confirms the same meaning and flags the term as obsolete in general usage. There is no meaningful divergence among sources — all agree on meaning and all agree the term is archaic. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural and jurisdictional context in which the term operated, which is the more useful information for a corpus researcher.