Definition
An archaic English legal term for a specific form of adultery. Two related but distinct meanings appear in historical sources:
1. Adultery committed between two parties both of whom were married — distinguishing the offense from simple adultery, in which only one party was married.
2. The continuing offense of an adulteress who persisted in living with the man with whom she had committed adultery, even after the act itself was complete.
The term is a variant spelling; "advowtry" appears in historical sources with equal frequency.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): adultery.
Historical common usage: The term has no meaningful presence in general English usage and was largely confined to legal and ecclesiastical writing. It derives from the same root as "adultery" and was understood in both legal and lay contexts as a reference to marital infidelity.
The gap worth noting is one of precision: where ordinary usage treats "adultery" as a single undifferentiated act, the legal term "advoutry" in its primary sense carried a technical qualifier — mutual marriage on both sides — that distinguished it from other forms of the offense with different legal consequences.
Common Confusion
Advoutry is sometimes treated as a simple synonym for adultery, but the distinction in historical sources is meaningful. Adultery in common law could involve one married party and one unmarried party. Advoutry, in its stricter legal usage, specified bilateral marriage, making the offense more serious under both ecclesiastical and common law. Researchers who treat the terms as interchangeable may miss how historical pleadings and statutes categorized the offense and what remedies or penalties attached to each category.
The second meaning — the continuing cohabitation offense — adds further complexity. This use of advoutry treated the persistence of the unlawful relationship as an ongoing wrong, not merely a past act, which had implications for property rights and the wife's dower or the husband's curtesy depending on the jurisdiction and period.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term that will appear in pre-nineteenth century English legal sources, ecclesiastical court records, and early American materials drawing on English common law inheritance. Researchers working in colonial and early republic American legal documents may encounter it, as the Black's citation to an 1839 Wisconsin case (*Hunter v. State*, 1 Pin. (Wis.) 91) confirms that the term survived into American usage.
Key research traps:
First, spelling variation is significant. "Advoutry," "advowtry," "advowtery," and "advowterie" all appear in historical sources. A search for one spelling will not retrieve the others. Full-corpus searches should account for all variants.
Second, the term sits at the intersection of ecclesiastical and common law jurisdiction, which were not always aligned. Ecclesiastical courts handled marriage and morality offenses; common law courts handled property consequences. A researcher tracking advoutry through one system only will get an incomplete picture.
Third, the proximity to "advowson" and related terms ("advowee," "avowee") in alphabetically organized historical dictionaries and digests means the terms can bleed together in transcriptions and indexes. The Black's entry itself runs directly from advoutry into the definition of "advowee" without a full break, which can cause confusion in partial transcriptions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) is the primary source available here and offers a compact but useful entry. It captures both the bilateral-marriage meaning and the cohabitation-continuation meaning, citing Co. Litt. 119 (Coke on Littleton) for the latter and *Hunter v. State* for the former. The Cowell and *Termes de la Ley* references signal that the term's roots are deep in medieval English legal vocabulary.
What historical dictionaries tend to understate is the practical decline of the term. By the nineteenth century, "advoutry" was already antiquarian in most common law jurisdictions, appearing in legal writing as a historical reference rather than an operative term of art. Black's inclusion of it reflects the dictionary's function as a guide to older materials, not as a description of then-current usage.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is primarily English in origin and was carried into early American common law. Its operational significance faded rapidly in American jurisdictions after the Revolution as statutory adultery law displaced the older common law and ecclesiastical frameworks. Researchers working in Louisiana or other mixed-law jurisdictions will not encounter this term in the civil law tradition.