Definition
An obsolete Law French spelling of dower — the right of a widow to a portion of her deceased husband's real property. The term appears in medieval English legal records and Year Book pleadings as a direct French-language rendering of the concept now universally rendered as "dower" in English legal usage. It carries no independent legal meaning separate from dower itself and is encountered almost exclusively in historical sources predating the consolidation of English legal terminology.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recorded as a current English word. The term has no living presence in ordinary English.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. By the nineteenth century, the form "dowere" had been entirely displaced by "dower" in both legal and general writing.
Editorial note: Because "dowere" has no common-language life at any period, researchers encountering the term are dealing with a purely orthographic and linguistic artifact of Anglo-Norman legal practice. The gap that matters here is not between common and legal meaning but between the historical written form and its modern legal equivalent.
Common Confusion
Dowere, dower, dowry, and dos are related but distinct terms that appear in overlapping historical sources and are frequently conflated.
Dower (the modernized form of dowere) is a widow's legal entitlement to a life estate in her husband's realty, arising by operation of law at his death.
Dowry (from the same French root, via a different path) refers to property brought by a bride to her husband at marriage — the opposite direction of transfer.
Dos in Roman and civil law tradition could refer to either the wife's contribution to the marriage or, in some usages, the husband's provision for the wife, depending on whether the source is applying Roman law, canon law, or the civilian tradition. Medieval English sources occasionally use dos as a near-synonym for dower in its common-law sense, which compounds the confusion.
Researchers working in medieval Year Books or ecclesiastical records should not assume that dos, dower, dowere, and dowry all describe the same right without carefully examining which legal tradition the source is operating within.
Why It Matters in Research
"Dowere" is a search and transcription challenge as much as a legal concept. Researchers working in Year Book materials, plea rolls, or early printed abridgments will encounter this spelling (and variants including dowere, douere, and dowere) precisely where the legal substance of dower is being argued. Failure to recognize the form means missed sources.
The fragment preserved in Burrill — "Dowere ne devietz avoir, qar vostre baroun est en vie" — is a pleading formula: dower you ought not to have, for your husband is alive. This represents one of the core defenses to a dower action in early common law practice. The husband's survival defeats the wife's dower claim entirely, since dower vested only at his death. That pleading logic remains embedded in later dower doctrine, even after the linguistic form changed.
Corpus researchers connecting to dower entries will find that the Year Book period (roughly Edward I through Henry VIII) is the primary habitat for the "dowere" spelling. After the printing and systematization of the common law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the anglicized "dower" becomes standard. Coke's treatment in the Institutes, and later Blackstone in the Commentaries, use "dower" exclusively. Any source using "dowere" as a live term (rather than a historical quotation) almost certainly predates 1500.
Index and catalog searches in digitized medieval legal archives should include both spellings as well as variant French forms, since scribal practice was not standardized.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats "dowere" minimally, defining it as the Law French equivalent of dower and supporting the entry with the Year Book of 1 Edward II — one of the earliest Year Books in the printed tradition. The quotation is a pleading exchange, not a doctrinal exposition, which reflects how Burrill characteristically uses Year Book material: as evidence of usage and procedural formula rather than as authority for substantive rules.
Burrill does not develop the substantive law of dower under this entry, redirecting readers implicitly to "dower" as the operative headword. This is the correct approach for a term that is purely a spelling variant, but it means that Burrill's entry for "dowere" provides navigational value (confirming the connection to the Year Books and the specific period) rather than doctrinal content.
Historical dictionaries including Jacob's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary do not carry separate entries for "dowere," having standardized on the anglicized form by their respective dates of publication. The term's absence from those sources is itself informative: by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it had passed entirely out of active legal vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
As a variant spelling, "dowere" has no independent jurisdictional distribution. The underlying right of dower, however, followed different paths in England and the American states, and was substantially modified or abolished in many jurisdictions by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Researchers should consult dower for jurisdictional treatment of the substantive right.