Definition
An obsolete Anglo-French legal term denoting a proctor, agent, or attorney authorized to act on behalf of another person. The term is the Law French adaptation of the Latin *procurator* and functions as a direct equivalent: one who undertakes the management of another's affairs, conducts litigation, or transacts business by authority of the principal. In medieval English legal usage, a procuratour could act in judicial proceedings or in matters of administration, standing in the place of the person who appointed him.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of *procurator*.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No distinct entry; the term was already archaic by the nineteenth century, subsumed under *procurator* and *proctor*.
The term has no meaningful life in ordinary modern English. Its only relevance is in historical legal texts, where it signals a formal appointment to represent or act for another — a concept that survives in modern law under agency, power of attorney, and related doctrines, but not under this name.
Common Confusion
PROCURATOUR / PROCURATOR / PROCTOR: These three terms are functionally interchangeable in medieval legal sources but belong to different linguistic registers. *Procuratour* is Law French; *procurator* is Latin; *proctor* is the anglicized form. A researcher encountering any of the three in historical documents is likely looking at the same underlying legal role. Conflation is not an error — the terms were used interchangeably — but awareness of the registers helps in identifying the age and origin of a source. Later English ecclesiastical and admiralty practice retained *proctor* as the standard term; civilian and canon law texts preferred *procurator*; Law French pleading and treatises used *procuratour*.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in medieval and early modern Law French sources — Britton, Bracton-era materials, and similar texts predating the gradual displacement of Law French from English legal writing. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should treat *procuratour* as a period marker: its presence signals a text drawing on the Anglo-French legal tradition, likely pre-seventeenth century.
The two references in Burrill — Britton chapter 4 and chapter 42 — are the anchoring citations. Chapter 42's phrase *par procuratours ou par baillyfs* ("by procurators or by bailiffs") is illustrative of how the term appears in practice: as one of several recognized modes of acting through a representative. Researchers should be alert to the fact that the scope of authority implied by *procuratour* in a given text may vary — the term could describe a narrow litigation proxy or a broader general agent depending on context, and historical sources do not always specify.
Cross-corpus navigation: entries under PROCURATOR, ATTORNEY, PROCTOR, and BAILIFF will supply the complementary Latin, anglicized, and parallel-office vocabulary needed to trace the full arc of representative authority in historical English law. The concept maps forward to modern AGENCY doctrine, but the institutional and procedural context is sufficiently distinct that direct equivalence should not be assumed without care.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the shelf sources. Burrill correctly identifies the term as Law French derived from the Latin *procurator* and gives both a functional definition (proctor; agent or attorney for another) and source citations to Britton. This is accurate and sufficient for the term's limited scope. What Burrill does not supply — and what no single dictionary entry can fully supply — is the range of contexts in which the role operated: ecclesiastical courts, common law courts, and civil administration each shaped the procuratour's authority somewhat differently. Researchers needing that granularity should move from the dictionary to the primary sources directly.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to the English legal tradition as shaped by the Anglo-French and civilian inheritances. Scots law, which preserved a stronger civilian and Latin vocabulary, used *procurator* more persistently and in somewhat different institutional contexts, including the office of Procurator Fiscal. Researchers working in Scottish historical records should not assume that the English Law French sense of *procuratour* maps cleanly onto Scots usage.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: PROCURATOR; AGENCY; ATTORNEY AND CLIENT