Definition
Aue ecclesiæ (also rendered "auæ ecclesiæ" or "alæ ecclesiæ" in variant manuscripts) is a Latin ecclesiastical and architectural term referring to the wings or side aisles of a church building. In its legal and historical context, the term appears in property descriptions, ecclesiastical records, and documents concerning the rights, maintenance, and ownership of church structures and their constituent parts. The side aisles of a medieval church were architecturally distinct from the nave and chancel, and their ownership, upkeep, and associated burial rights were frequently the subject of legal dispute between parishes, lay proprietors, and ecclesiastical authorities.
Common Confusion
The term is easily misread or misrendered in historical sources. Variant spellings include "alæ ecclesiæ" (using "ala," meaning wing), "auæ," and corrupted forms introduced through transcription error or typographical inconsistency. Researchers encountering this term in manuscript sources or early printed legal texts should treat all such variants as referring to the same structural and legal concept. The confusion between "aua" and "ala" is particularly common and appears to reflect copyist substitution rather than any meaningful distinction in usage.
Why It Matters in Research
This term surfaces almost exclusively in ecclesiastical property law contexts — specifically in disputes over chancel repair liability, pew rights, burial rights in side aisles, and the obligations of lay rectors or impropriators. Researchers working in English ecclesiastical law, canon law records, or pre-Reformation church property documents should note several navigational points.
First, the term is rare in secular legal dictionaries and is largely absent from later editions of Black's, making Black's 2nd Ed. Supplemental one of the few dictionary-level references for the term in American legal bibliography. Its presence there suggests it was encountered in practice, likely in the context of translated ecclesiastical instruments or ecclesiastical court records being read into common law proceedings.
Second, the architectural meaning is inseparable from the legal meaning. In medieval and early modern English law, different portions of a church building carried different legal obligations. The nave was typically the responsibility of the parishioners; the chancel, of the rector or impropriator. The side aisles occupied a more contested middle ground — their maintenance could fall to the lord of a manor, a family holding pew or burial rights in that aisle, or the parish at large. Any document referencing "aue ecclesiæ" or its variants may therefore be embedded in a dispute over property rights, repair obligations, or mortuary privileges.
Third, researchers in colonial American ecclesiastical records or early church property cases may encounter the term in instruments drawn from English precedent, though its appearance in American legal sources is uncommon.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) defines the term as "the wings or side aisles of a church," attributing the definition to Blount — a reference to Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary (1670), one of the foundational English legal dictionaries and a primary source for ecclesiastical and archaic Latin legal terminology. Blount's inclusion of the term reflects the legal significance of church architectural divisions in seventeenth-century English property and ecclesiastical law.
No further elaboration appears in Black's beyond the single-line definition and the Blount attribution. Later editions of Black's do not carry the term forward, suggesting it was recognized as archaic even by the early twentieth century. Researchers should not expect to find substantive doctrinal treatment of this specific term in American legal dictionaries beyond this supplemental entry. English ecclesiastical law treatises and records of the ecclesiastical courts are the more productive sources for contextual depth.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs almost entirely to the English ecclesiastical law tradition and its antecedents in canon law. It has no meaningful independent life in American statutory or common law, appearing in American legal materials only when ecclesiastical instruments drafted under English law are at issue.