Definition
In old English legal practice, the party against whom an appeal was brought — that is, the accused in a formal appeal of felony. The appellatus was the defendant in the appeal proceeding, standing opposite the appellator (the accusing party). The term is Latin, drawn from the procedure of private criminal appeals in medieval common law, in which one individual formally accused another before a court and the accused was designated the appellatus.
In the civil law tradition, the term carried a distinct and nearly opposite sense: the appellatus was the judge or tribunal to whom an appeal was directed — the judge ad quem — rather than a party to the proceeding.
Common Confusion
The two meanings of appellatus belong to distinct legal systems and must not be conflated. In common law sources, appellatus is the accused party in an appeal of felony. In civil law sources, the same word refers to the receiving judge in an appellate proceeding. A researcher encountering the term in a medieval English source and a Roman or continental source should not assume consistent usage. Burrill flags both meanings explicitly; Calvinius's Lexicon Juridicum is the authority for the civil law sense. When the context is unclear, identify the legal tradition of the source before inferring meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources treating medieval common law procedure, specifically the appeal of felony — a private accusatory action in which the victim or their kin accused a named individual of a serious crime. The appeal of felony was a distinct proceeding from an indictment; it survived in English law for centuries but had largely fallen into disuse by the nineteenth century and was formally abolished in England in 1819.
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal records, Year Books, or early treatise literature (Glanvill, Bracton, or materials citing Statute of Westminster II) will encounter appellatus as a standard procedural term. It will not appear in modern appellate practice materials, where the equivalent party is called the appellee or respondent.
The civil law usage adds a layer of complexity. Continental and ecclesiastical legal sources use appellatus to mean the judge receiving the appeal, not a party at all. This inversion is a genuine trap: a researcher moving between common law and civil law sources on appeal procedure without flagging the terminological shift may draw incorrect conclusions about who is being described.
The term also illustrates a broader challenge in Law Mind corpus research: Latin procedural terms borrowed into different legal traditions were not always borrowed with consistent meaning. Cross-referencing Burrill's common law definition against Calvinius or other civil law lexica is advisable whenever the term appears in a document of uncertain tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary historical treatment. Burrill clearly distinguishes the two usages: the common law sense (accused party in an appeal of felony) and the civil law sense (judge ad quem). His citations anchor the common law usage in Glanvill, Bracton, and the Statute of Westminster II — the foundational texts of medieval English criminal procedure. The civil law sense is attributed to Calvinius's Lexicon Juridicum, a standard reference for Roman and continental legal Latin.
No substantive conflict exists between sources here, because the term is defined only by Burrill among the shelf dictionaries. The gap to note is what historical sources leave unaddressed: the abolition of the appeal of felony by the nineteenth century means that later legal dictionaries largely dropped appellatus as a live term, treating it as historical curiosity rather than active vocabulary. Researchers should not expect to find appellatus defined in post-nineteenth century English legal dictionaries with the same prominence it received in earlier works.
Jurisdictional Note
The common law meaning of appellatus is specific to English legal history and the appeal of felony procedure. It does not carry over into American law, which did not adopt the appeal of felony as a general criminal procedure. American appellate terminology uses appellee or respondent for the party defending against an appeal.