Definition
Avisamentum is a Latin term from medieval English legal usage meaning advice or counsel. It appears primarily in formal royal grants and administrative records, where it denotes the advisory assent of a deliberative body — typically the king's council — that preceded or accompanied an official act. The phrase de avisamento et consensu consilii ("by the advice and consent of our council") was the standard recital in royal grants signaling that the sovereign had acted with formal counsel rather than by unilateral prerogative.
The term belongs to the Latin legal vocabulary of English administrative and chancery practice and is not a term of art in modern law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering avisamentum will find it almost exclusively in pre-modern English sources: royal charters, patent rolls, close rolls, and year books from the medieval and early modern periods. Its significance is constitutional as much as terminological. The recital de avisamento et consensu consilii was not mere ceremony — it reflected the developing principle that royal grants and significant acts of governance carried greater authority and legitimacy when made with the formal participation of the council. Tracking the presence or absence of this formula in a series of grants can illuminate the practical operation of conciliar government at a given moment.
The closely related verb form avisare (to advise) appears in year book entries, often in the phrase nondum avisantur ("not yet advised"), indicating that the court had taken a matter under advisement and had not yet reached a judgment. Researchers using year books should recognize that this usage connects avisamentum to judicial deliberation as well as royal administration — the same root concept of formal deliberative advice applies in both contexts.
The term will not appear in modern legal databases in any operative sense. Researchers searching historical corpora should also query advisamentum, avisare, advisare, and the English phrase "advice and consent," which carries the same structural idea forward into constitutional instruments including the United States Constitution's treatment of Senate involvement in treaties and appointments — though that later usage is conceptually descended from the broader tradition rather than a direct continuation of this Latin formula.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, drawing on Cowell's Interpreter for the standard royal grant formula and citing a Year Book reference (Pasch. 18 Hen. VI, fo. 9) for the verb form avisare. Burrill cross-references advisare, acknowledging that the two spellings and the Latin and Law Latin forms coexist in the sources.
Burrill's treatment is functionally complete for identifying the term and its primary contexts, but it does not develop the constitutional significance of the advice-and-consent formula — a gap that matters for researchers interested in medieval conciliar government. The Cowell citation is useful: Cowell's Interpreter (1607) was itself a glossary of legal and administrative terms drawn from practice, and its account of royal grant formulas reflects actual chancery usage rather than theoretical description.
No significant divergence exists among historical dictionaries on this term; its meaning is narrow and consistent across sources that address it at all. The more common omission is the term's absence from many legal dictionaries entirely, reflecting its obsolescence by the time most English-language legal dictionaries were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
Avisamentum is specific to English legal and administrative history and has no operative presence in any modern common law jurisdiction. Researchers working in Scots legal history or ecclesiastical records may encounter analogous Latin formulas but should not assume identical usage without verification in jurisdiction-specific sources.