Definition
In old English law, an approbator was an alternative Latin form for what English legal practice called an approver — a person accused of a crime who, rather than stand trial alone, turned crown's evidence against alleged accomplices in exchange for a chance at pardon or acquittal. The term derives from the Latin approbare and appears in historical pleading records as a functional synonym for approver and probator. It is not a term of modern practice and survives only in historical legal sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person who gives formal approval.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who approves.
The common meaning — someone who endorses or sanctions something — is nearly the opposite of the legal context. An approbator in old English law was not a figure of authority granting approval but an accused criminal seeking to save himself by testifying against others. The semantic connection is to the Latin root approbare (to prove or confirm), not to the modern sense of approval as endorsement.
Common Confusion
APPROBATOR / APPROVER / PROBATOR: These three terms refer to substantially the same procedural role in old English criminal practice. Burrill treats them as interchangeable and cross-references them directly. Probator is the more Latinate form; approver is the established English term that dominates common law treatises and case records; approbator appears chiefly in pleading contexts and is the rarest of the three. Researchers should not treat these as meaningfully distinct roles — the variation is terminological, not functional.
Why It Matters in Research
Approbator is a needle-in-a-haystack term. It appears rarely in the corpus and almost exclusively in Latin pleading records or secondary sources that quote or gloss such records. Researchers encountering it should immediately redirect to approver, which carries the substantive doctrinal history. If you are searching historical pleading records and encounter approbator, Towns. Pl. (Townshend on Pleading) is the source Burrill cites — worth consulting if that specific procedural context is at issue. The term will not appear in modern digests, reporters, or statutory materials. Its presence in a document is itself a dating signal: you are likely looking at pre-eighteenth-century pleading records or a treatise drawing directly from them.
The approver procedure it names was a feature of English criminal law that had largely fallen away before American law developed its own traditions. Researchers working on early colonial criminal procedure may encounter it, but it has no direct American statutory or common law lineage under this name.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's is the only source in the Law Mind shelf to define this term, and its treatment is deliberately thin: a single line identifying the term as old English law, glossing it as approver, and pointing to Townshend's Pleading and the companion entries for Approver and Probator. That brevity is appropriate — Burrill recognized approbator as a terminological variant rather than an independent concept requiring extended treatment. No other standard historical law dictionary (Bouvier, Black's early editions) appears to have given it a standalone entry, which confirms its peripheral status even within historical legal vocabulary. The action Burrill describes — an accused turning evidence against confederates — is well documented under approver in treatises from Bracton onward; approbator is simply the Latinized pleading form of that same actor.