Definition
An obsolete term from old English law meaning adultery. AVOWTRY denoted the criminal or ecclesiastical offense of sexual intercourse between a married person and someone other than their spouse. The term appears in early English legal texts and abridgments, including Termes de la Ley, as the standard legal label for what modern law calls adultery. It carried no meaning distinct from adultery itself; the variation is purely terminological and historical.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): adultery.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Adultery. See Advoutry."
Editorial note: The common and legal meanings are identical — AVOWTRY is simply an archaic spelling variant for the concept of adultery. The gap for researchers is not one of meaning but of recognition: encountering AVOWTRY in a historical source without knowing the term may send a researcher looking for a distinct offense that does not exist.
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Common Confusion
AVOWTRY, ADVOWTRY, ADVOUTRY, and ADVOWTERY are all variant spellings of the same term referring to adultery. Researchers encountering any of these forms in historical documents should treat them as equivalent. None carries a technically distinct legal meaning from the others. Separately, AVOWTRY should not be confused with AVOWRY (also spelled AVOWRY or AVOW), a procedurally distinct old English term used in replevin actions where a defendant justifies the taking of property — a concept with no connection to adultery. The visual similarity of AVOWTRY and AVOWRY has caused indexing errors in historical legal digests.
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Why It Matters in Research
AVOWTRY is a terminal-stage historical term — it appears in early English legal sources and virtually disappears from use after the seventeenth century, leaving no procedural or doctrinal legacy under that name. Researchers working in Law Mind's corpus of historical English law materials are most likely to encounter it in abridgments, glossaries, or ecclesiastical court records, not in case reporters or statutes.
Three navigational points matter. First, spelling is unstable across sources. Historical documents render this term as AVOWTRY, ADVOWTRY, ADVOUTRY, ADVOWTERY, and ADVOUTERY. A keyword search on any single spelling will miss occurrences under the others. Burrill's cross-reference to ADVOWTRY confirms the variant was recognized even by the historical dictionaries themselves.
Second, jurisdiction matters for historical research in a temporal sense. AVOWTRY as a label is an English common law and ecclesiastical law term. Researchers examining colonial American or early American legal materials will find the underlying concept — adultery — treated under that modern name or under local statutory language, not under AVOWTRY.
Third, the term is a pointer, not a doctrine. AVOWTRY contributed no procedural rules, elements, or analytical framework of its own. Its historical legal dictionary entries are uniformly one-line glosses. Any substantive law research on adultery in historical English sources should migrate immediately to entries and materials organized under ADULTERY, which is where the doctrinal content lives.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree without reservation: AVOWTRY means adultery. Black's (both editions) and Burrill each trace the term to Termes de la Ley, a fifteenth-century English legal glossary that served as a foundational reference for early common lawyers. Bouvier adds the same definition but contributes nothing beyond it.
None of the historical dictionaries offer elements, procedural context, penalties, or distinctions between ecclesiastical and common law treatment. This uniform brevity signals that AVOWTRY was already a receding term when these dictionaries were compiled — preserved as a gloss for historical completeness rather than as a living legal concept. Notably, Burrill explicitly cross-references ADVOWTRY, acknowledging the spelling instability the other dictionaries ignore.
Webster's 1913 itself treats AVOWTRY as simply "adultery" and redirects to ADVOUTRY, reinforcing that even outside legal literature the term was understood as a variant spelling rather than an independent concept.
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Jurisdictional Note
AVOWTRY is an English term with no meaningful American common law presence under that name. American jurisdictions addressing adultery — whether as a ground for divorce, a criminal offense, or a factor in property or custody proceedings — use the term ADULTERY. Research in American legal sources should proceed under that heading from the outset.
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