Definition
An avower is a party in an action of replevin who, having taken or detained goods, formally acknowledges and justifies that taking rather than denying it. The avower does not contest whether the act occurred; instead, he asserts a legal right or title sufficient to make the taking lawful. This acknowledgment and defense is called an avowry.
In older usage, the term also carried a secondary sense in ecclesiastical property law as a person asserting a claim connected to an advowson — the right of presentation to a church living. Burrill's notation of "Avoweson" and "Avowson" in immediate sequence with Avower reflects this connection in the medieval sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person who avows.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who avows or asserts.
The common meaning captures only the general sense of open assertion. In law, the avower's declaration is not merely a personal statement but a formal procedural posture in replevin: rather than pleading that the distress or taking never happened, the avower admits it and stands on the legal justification. The legal term carries procedural weight the common definition cannot convey.
Common Confusion
AVOWER and AVOWANT are sometimes used interchangeably in older texts, but the distinction between the party (avower) and the act or pleading (avowry) must be kept clear when reading historical records. Similarly, AVOWER in the replevin context should not be confused with its vestigial appearance near ADVOWSON/AVOWESON in Norman French sources. Burrill places these entries in proximity because the spelling variants overlapped in medieval law French, but advowson concerns ecclesiastical patronage rights and is unrelated to replevin procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will almost exclusively encounter AVOWER in the context of common-law replevin pleading, particularly in English and early American sources predating the merger of law and equity. Because modern civil procedure has largely replaced the formal action of replevin with statutory remedies for recovery of personal property, the term has become archaic in contemporary practice. This creates a research trap: the word appears with some frequency in older case reporters and year books but rarely in any source after the mid-nineteenth century.
The Norman French spelling variants — avower, avouer, avoer — appear in year book materials and early treatises without standardization. When cross-searching digitized historical collections, researchers should run multiple spelling variants to avoid missing relevant entries. Burrill himself flags the French origin (L. Fr.) and the secondary sense drawn from Kelham's dictionary of Norman French.
The proximity of AVOWER to AVOWESON/ADVOWSON in Burrill is a genuine research hazard. A reader skimming quickly may conflate two legally unrelated concepts that share only etymological kinship and physical proximity on the dictionary page.
In American jurisdictions, avowry pleading persisted in some states well into the nineteenth century alongside the old forms of replevin. Researchers examining property disputes, landlord-tenant matters (particularly distress for rent), and early chattel recovery cases should be alert to the avower/avowry framework as the procedural skeleton underlying the dispute.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is compact but precise. He identifies three distinct senses encoded in the Norman French root: (1) to avow or acknowledge, (2) to justify or maintain, and (3) to challenge — citing Kelham for the third sense. This three-part rendering maps closely to the procedural logic of replevin: the avower acknowledges the taking, asserts its justification, and in doing so challenges the plaintiff's claim to have the goods returned without condition.
Burrill's immediate pivot to AVOWESON/AVOWSON (advowson) in the same entry sequence reflects the lexicographic habits of Norman French dictionaries, where orthographic proximity drove arrangement. This is not evidence of legal equivalence — it is an artifact of the sources Burrill was drawing on, including Britton and the Year Books of Edward II. Modern researchers should treat this adjacency as a bibliographic curiosity rather than a substantive connection.
No significant point of divergence exists among the primary historical sources on the core meaning of avower; the term was stable within its procedural context. What historical dictionaries collectively underrepresent is how quickly the term fell out of use as common-law pleading forms were abolished and statutory replevin was adopted.
Jurisdictional Note
The formal action of replevin and its associated pleading vocabulary, including avower and avowry, were inherited by American jurisdictions from English common law but were progressively displaced by statute. A handful of states retained common-law replevin forms longer than others; researchers working in New York, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts historical records will encounter avowry pleading more frequently than in states that adopted early codes.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Replevin (for the procedural context in which the avower appears); Advowson (to distinguish the ecclesiastical property concept that shares etymological roots).