Definition
An avowee is an alternative form of advowee: the person holding the right to present a candidate to an ecclesiastical benefice — that is, to nominate a clergyman for appointment to a church living such as a rectory or vicarage. The avowee's right derived from ownership or inheritance of an advowson, which was treated in English law as a species of incorporeal hereditament and could be bought, sold, or devised like real property.
The term appears almost exclusively in historical ecclesiastical and property law contexts. It has no operative modern usage in either civil or canon law in the United States.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Alternative spelling of advowee.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The person who has a right to present to a benefice; the patron; an advowee. See Advowson.
The common and legal meanings here are essentially continuous — Webster's 1913 is itself drawing from the legal tradition. The term never had a meaningfully distinct popular life outside the church-property context from which it arose. The practical gap is not between common and legal meaning but between historical and modern usage: the word has almost entirely disappeared from both registers.
Common Confusion
AVOWEE / ADVOWEE / ADVOWSON: These three terms are closely related but not interchangeable. Avowee and advowee are variant spellings of the same office — the person holding the right. Advowson is the right itself, treated as a property interest. Researchers encountering any of these spellings in historical records should check under all three headings, as indexing in older ecclesiastical court records and legal digests is inconsistent. Rapalje & Lawrence cross-references avowee directly to advowee without independent definition, which is instructive: the two spellings were treated as identical in legal use, not as distinct concepts.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a spelling variant, not a substantive legal distinction, and that is the primary research intelligence a user needs. The word appears in pre-twentieth-century English ecclesiastical law materials — church court records, tithe disputes, presentations to livings, and property disputes involving advowsons — where spelling standardization was weak. A researcher searching a corpus for advowee may miss documents indexed or transcribed under avowee, and vice versa.
Several practical traps arise in historical sources:
First, the distinction between the avowee (the patron holding the right) and the presentee (the clergyman being presented) is sometimes blurred in informal usage, particularly in non-legal narrative sources. Context usually resolves this, but the researcher should verify which party is meant.
Second, advowson disputes were litigated in both the royal common law courts and the ecclesiastical courts in England, and the procedural vocabulary differs across those traditions. A term appearing in an ecclesiastical court record may carry slightly different contextual weight than the same term in a common law pleading.
Third, American legal materials rarely use this term at all. If avowee appears in an American source, it almost certainly signals a direct borrowing from English ecclesiastical law, a discussion of colonial-era church property, or a treatise writer citing English authority. It should not be read as reflecting operative American doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in complete agreement: Black's (both editions) and Bouvier define avowee identically as "an advocate of a church benefice" in ecclesiastical law. The word advocate here carries its older sense of patron or protector rather than the modern sense of legal representative — a distinction worth noting for researchers accustomed to contemporary usage.
Rapalje & Lawrence decline to define the term independently, simply directing the reader to advowee. This is editorially significant: it confirms that the two spellings were understood as interchangeable variants, not separate entries warranting separate treatment.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any structural account of how the avowee's right operated within the broader ecclesiastical property framework — the mechanics of presentation, lapse, simony, or the role of the bishop as check on the patron's power. For that analytical context, the researcher must move to treatises and the encyclopedia entries on advowson.
Jurisdictional Note
Avowee and the underlying institution of advowson are creatures of English ecclesiastical law with no direct American equivalent. Some colonial-era American jurisdictions grappled with analogous questions of church patronage, but American constitutional disestablishment eliminated the legal framework that gave the term its operative meaning. The term appears in American legal dictionaries as a historical matter, not as a description of living doctrine.