Definition
An appellour is a historical common-law term for the party who initiated an appeal in the older procedural sense — specifically, the accuser or plaintiff in a criminal appeal. The word denotes the person who formally accused another of a crime through the mechanism of an "appeal," a now-obsolete private criminal prosecution distinct from the modern appellate process.
The term belongs to the vocabulary of medieval English criminal procedure and has no living role in contemporary practice.
Common Confusion
APPELLOUR vs. APPELLANT: These are not synonyms and should not be read interchangeably in historical sources. An appellant in modern practice is a party seeking review of a court's judgment. An appellour in medieval practice was an accuser initiating a private criminal prosecution. The surface similarity of the words masks a fundamental difference in procedural role. The shift in dominant meaning reflects the complete transformation of the word "appeal" from accusation to review.
APPELLOUR vs. APPROVER: Both figures brought criminal appeals in medieval practice, but an approver was specifically a felon who confessed and then accused accomplices, staking his own life on the outcome. An appellour could be any private accuser, including a victim's family member. The approver is sometimes called an appellour in older texts, which adds to the confusion.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary trap here is anachronism. Researchers encountering "appellour" in historical sources may instinctively read it through the lens of modern appellate practice, where an appellant is the party challenging a lower court's ruling. That reading is wrong. In the context where "appellour" appears — predominantly Year Books, Bracton-era treatises, and early common-law commentaries — an appeal was not a review proceeding. It was an accusatory proceeding: a private individual accusing another of a crime and offering to prove the charge, sometimes by battle.
The appellour, then, is the accuser, not the losing party seeking review. The person accused in such a proceeding was called the appellee or, in some sources, the defendant in appeal.
Researchers working in early English legal records should note that the procedural appeal by way of private accusation was effectively abolished in England by the early nineteenth century following the notorious Ashford v. Thornton (1818) episode, after which Parliament eliminated trial by battle. Sources predating that period may use "appeal" and its derivatives in this older accusatory sense without explanation.
For Law Mind corpus purposes: this term appears in sources treating medieval criminal procedure, the law of appeals of felony, and the transition from private accusation to public prosecution. If tracing the shift from appellour/appellee vocabulary to prosecutor/defendant vocabulary, the relevant zone of the corpus is pre-1820 English criminal procedure. Connections run to the broader entries on appeal of felony, approver (a related figure — the crown witness who turned accuser in exchange for pardon), and the wager of battle.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill defines appellour concisely as the party who brought an appeal — the plaintiff in an appeal — citing Britton, the thirteenth-century French-language law treatise attributed to Edward I's reign. This is a reliable anchor. Britton is among the foundational sources for appellour and related vocabulary, alongside Bracton and Fleta.
What Burrill's brief entry does not develop is the functional distinction between an appellour acting on personal grievance (as in an appeal of murder by a victim's kin) and an approver — a convicted felon who turned king's evidence and brought appeals against accomplices to earn a pardon. The approver occupied a particularly fraught position: if his appeals failed, he faced execution. These two figures — the private appellour and the approver-appellour — appear in the historical sources under overlapping vocabulary, and researchers should not conflate them.
Broader historical dictionaries such as Jacob's Law Dictionary and Termes de la Ley address "appeal" in the criminal accusation sense at greater length, providing useful context that Burrill's compressed entry lacks.