Definition
An appellor is a term from old English law with two related but distinct meanings:
1. A criminal who confesses to a felony and, in exchange for leniency, formally accuses and informs against his accomplices — giving sworn testimony that could lead to their trial or execution. This was a mechanism by which a guilty party could escape punishment by bringing others to justice.
2. A person who challenges a jury — that is, one who formally objects to the composition of a jury panel in a criminal proceeding.
The term is archaic and carries no operative meaning in modern law. It belongs to the procedural vocabulary of medieval and early modern English criminal practice and appears almost exclusively in historical legal sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general use. Where it appears, it is treated as a legal or historical term meaning one who appeals or accuses.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The person who institutes an appeal, or prosecutes another for a crime. One who confesses a felony committed and accuses his accomplices."
Webster's 1913 captures both the legal senses accurately, which is unsurprising given the term's purely technical character. Researchers should note, however, that the Webster's framing blends the two meanings without distinguishing them, and the phrase "institutes an appeal" can mislead a modern reader into conflating appellor with appellant — a different term with entirely different procedural significance.
Common Confusion
APPELLOR vs. APPELLANT: These terms look and sound similar but are not interchangeable. An appellant is the party who brings an appeal to a higher court in any era of law — a concept still fully operative today. An appellor is a medieval English term with no modern equivalent, referring either to an informing accomplice or a jury challenger. Conflating the two in historical research produces significant interpretive error. The confusion is compounded by the fact that some older sources use appellor loosely to mean any person who appeals.
APPELLOR vs. APPROVER: Burrill's cross-reference to approver is essential. In medieval English practice, the approver (from the Latin approbator) was the more technically precise term for the accomplice-informer. Appellor and approver were often used interchangeably in the sources, but approver became the more stable term of art in later treatises. Researchers encountering appellor in a manuscript or digest should check whether the source uses approver as a synonym or treats the two as distinct roles.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears in a narrow but important band of sources: medieval criminal records, early modern legal treatises, and digest literature drawing on those traditions. Researchers working in these areas should be alert to several navigational issues.
First, the two meanings of appellor — informing accomplice and jury challenger — are procedurally unrelated, and sources do not always specify which sense is intended. Context is essential; the jury-challenge meaning is far less common in surviving literature.
Second, appellor is frequently an entry point into the approver doctrine, one of the more complex institutions of medieval English criminal law, under which an accomplice who "appealed" others could trigger trial by battle or jury. The Law Mind corpus likely contains references to this practice scattered across encyclopedia entries, historical treatises, and digest headnotes. Burrill's direction to "See Approver" is a reliable navigation cue.
Third, because appellor is archaic, it will not appear in modern statutory materials, case law reporters after roughly the eighteenth century, or contemporary procedural codes. If it surfaces in a modern document, it is almost certainly a quotation, a historical gloss, or an error.
Fourth, researchers should be careful with digitized sources. Optical character recognition errors can render appellor as appellant or vice versa, and keyword searches across the corpus will require manual verification of surrounding context.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four historical dictionaries are in close agreement on substance, reflecting a shared source tradition — all appear to draw on Blount's Glossographia and Blackstone's Commentaries. Bouvier and both editions of Black's define appellor identically in substance: a criminal who accuses accomplices, or who challenges a jury. Burrill narrows slightly, defining only the accomplice-informer sense and omitting the jury-challenge meaning, while directing readers to approver for fuller treatment.
None of the dictionary entries engage with the procedural mechanics of the institution — how the appeal of felony operated, what happened to the appellor if the accusation failed, or how the doctrine declined. For those questions, the dictionaries are insufficient starting points. Blackstone's Commentaries (Book IV) and the older plea roll scholarship provide necessary depth that the dictionaries gesture toward but do not supply.
Jurisdictional Note
Appellor as a term of art was specific to English common law and never took root in American legal practice as an operative concept. American jurisdictions inherited the appeal mechanism in modified form but abandoned the accomplice-informer institution. The term may appear in early American legal dictionaries as a matter of inherited English vocabulary, but it has no American procedural equivalent.