Definition
An archaic English legal term denoting the offense committed by a woman who, having engaged in adultery, continued to cohabit with her adulterer. The term captures not merely the act of adultery itself but the sustained, open condition of living with a paramour after the fact — a distinction that carried moral and legal significance in ecclesiastical and early common law contexts. The offense was recognized primarily in ecclesiastical courts, which had jurisdiction over matrimonial and sexual misconduct in pre-Reformation and early post-Reformation England.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): adultery.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No direct entry for advowtry; the root concept corresponds to adultery, defined as voluntary sexual intercourse of a married person with a partner other than the lawful spouse.
The gap matters. Ordinary usage treats adultery as the act; advowtry is the legal term for the persisting state of cohabitation that followed adultery. A researcher who reads advowtry as a simple synonym for adultery will misread its ecclesiastical-law significance — the ongoing nature of the relationship was what constituted the distinct offense.
Common Confusion
ADVOWTRY is frequently conflated with ADULTERY and with ADVOUTRY (an alternate spelling of the same term). Black's 2nd Edition directs the reader to ADVOUTRY rather than defining advowtry independently, signaling that the two spellings were used interchangeably but that neither displaced the other consistently across sources. Researchers should search both spellings in historical sources. Additionally, advowtry should not be confused with AVOWTRY, which some older glossaries treat as a variant but which certain ecclesiastical sources distinguish on narrow grounds of party identity (the man's continued cohabitation versus the woman's).
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a trap for the unwary. Because Black's 2nd Edition offers only a cross-reference to ADVOUTRY rather than a substantive definition, a researcher who encounters advowtry in a primary source and consults only Black's must follow that cross-reference or risk a dead end. Bouvier supplies the operative content.
Spelling instability is the central research hazard. Historical sources render this word as advowtry, advoutry, advoutery, avoutry, and avowtry with no consistent pattern. Corpus searches confined to a single spelling will miss significant occurrences. Researchers working in ecclesiastical court records, early common law treatises, or legal glossaries from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries should build searches around the root advout- and avout- to capture the full range.
The term also has a jurisdictional ceiling: it belongs almost entirely to English ecclesiastical law and the early common law tradition. It does not appear as a recognized legal category in American law, which inherited the broader concept of adultery but did not transplant this specific ecclesiastical offense. Any appearance of advowtry in an American legal source is therefore likely a learned borrowing or a quotation from an English authority, not an operative legal term.
The offense's gendered framing is historically significant and analytically relevant. Bouvier's definition specifies the woman as the offending party, reflecting the asymmetric treatment of sexual misconduct under ecclesiastical law. Researchers examining gender and legal history in the Law Mind corpus will find this term a productive node connecting matrimonial law, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the history of moral regulation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Black agree on the core meaning but diverge in depth. Bouvier provides the substantive definition, citing Cowel and Termes de la Ley — both recognized sources for early English legal terminology — which grounds the definition in the recognized glossary tradition of English law. Black's 2nd Edition, by contrast, offers no independent analysis, treating the term as a variant spelling and redirecting the reader. This pattern suggests that by the time of Black's composition, advowtry had receded sufficiently from active legal use that a full entry was not deemed necessary.
Neither source traces the offense's enforcement history or explains the jurisdictional relationship between ecclesiastical courts and the common law courts with any precision. Researchers seeking that procedural context must go beyond these dictionaries to sources on ecclesiastical jurisdiction in pre-Reformation England.
Cowel's Interpreter and Termes de la Ley, cited by Bouvier, are the primary historical dictionary anchors for this term. Both are available in historical legal collections and represent the best contemporaneous glossary treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Advowtry is an English ecclesiastical law term with no recognized American legal counterpart. It does not appear as a statutory or common law offense in any American jurisdiction. Researchers encountering the term in an American context should treat it as a historical or comparative reference rather than operative law.