Definition
In English ecclesiastical law, an advowee is the holder of an advowson — that is, the patron who possesses the right to present a candidate for appointment to a vacant church benefice. When a living (such as a rectory or vicariate) became vacant, the advowee was the person legally entitled to nominate the next incumbent to the bishop for institution. The right was a property right, could be bought, sold, and inherited, and was entirely distinct from the office itself. The advowee had no authority to exercise the clerical functions of the benefice; the right was solely one of presentation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "One who has an advowson."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "One who has an advowson. Cowell."
The common and legal definitions are effectively identical here, but only because both common-language sources themselves presuppose legal context. Neither the Wiktionary nor Webster's entry communicates anything to a reader unfamiliar with advowson. In practice, advowee is pure ecclesiastical legal vocabulary, and understanding the term requires understanding the underlying right it describes.
Common Confusion
ADVOWEE and INCUMBENT are frequently conflated in historical documents. The incumbent is the clergyman actually appointed to and serving the benefice. The advowee is the lay (or sometimes ecclesiastical) patron who holds the right of presentation — the one who selects, not the one who serves. A single individual could, in unusual circumstances, hold both roles, but the concepts remain legally separate. Similarly, ADVOWEE should not be confused with ORDINARY, the bishop or ecclesiastical superior who had the power to accept or reject the patron's presentee. The advowee nominated; the ordinary instituted.
Why It Matters in Research
Advowee appears almost exclusively in pre-20th-century English ecclesiastical and property law sources. Researchers working in those corpora need to understand several traps:
First, terminology is unstable across historical periods. Medieval and early modern sources use advocatus, advoué, avoué, and avouson interchangeably with varying spellings. Burrill flags the Latin and Law French roots precisely because a researcher scanning older records will encounter these forms rather than the anglicized advowee.
Second, the right of advowson — and therefore the identity and legal standing of the advowee — was litigated extensively in the English common law courts through the real action of quare impedit and related writs. Records of these proceedings are a primary source for tracing the ownership of advowsons over time. The advowee as a party in litigation will appear in plea rolls, Year Books, and early law reports.
Third, the Reformation substantially complicated advowee status. Monastic houses had held large numbers of advowsons; the dissolution transferred these to the Crown and then to private grantees, producing disputed chains of title that generated significant litigation through the 16th and 17th centuries. A researcher tracing advowee identity in this period must account for these disruptions.
Fourth, the term is nearly obsolete in living legal practice. The Patronage (Benefices) Measure 1986 reformed the English system, and while advowson and patronage rights still technically exist in the Church of England, the vocabulary of advowee belongs to the historical record rather than current practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most substantive entry among the available sources, identifying the advowee as "a patron; one who has a right to present to a benefice" and anchoring the term in English ecclesiastical law with a reference to Stat. 25 Edw. (the Statute of Edward I or II regarding advowsons). Burrill correctly draws attention to the Latin advocatus and Law French advoue/avoue as antecedents — this philological grounding is genuinely useful because it helps researchers identify the same concept across different documentary languages. Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary offer nothing beyond the circular definition ("one who has an advowson") and defer to Cowell's Interpreter, the early-17th-century law dictionary, which itself treats the term as technical vocabulary requiring no plain explanation. Taken together, the historical sources confirm this was a settled, specialized term of art within ecclesiastical property law, but none of them captures the litigation history or the conveyancing dimensions that make the term consequential for legal research.
Jurisdictional Note
Advowee is exclusively a term of English ecclesiastical law and has no meaningful counterpart in American law, which rejected the established church framework and therefore had no advowsons to administer. Researchers working in Scottish or Irish ecclesiastical history will encounter related but distinct patronage vocabularies shaped by different ecclesiastical structures and reform histories.