or ADVOWSON, a sort of incorporeal hereditament, consisting in the right of presentation to a church or ecclesiastical benefice. Advowson, advocatio, signifies in clientelam recipere, the taking into protection; and therefore is synonymous with patronage, patronatus; and he who has the right of advowson is called the patron of the church. For when lords of manors first built churches on their own demesnes, and appointed the tithes of those manors to be paid to the officiating ministers, which before were given to the clergy in common (from whence arose the division of parishes), the lord who thus built a church, and endowed it with a glebe or land, had of common right a power annexed of nominating such minister as he pleased (provided he were canonically qualified) to officiate in that church, of which he was the founder, endower, maintainer, or, in one word, the patron.

Advowsons are either advowson appendant, or advowsons in gross. Lords of manors being originally the only founders, and of course the only patrons, of churches, the right of patronage or presentation, so long as it continues annexed to the possession of the manor, as some have done from the foundation of the church to this day, is called an advowson appendant; and it will pass, or be conveyed, together with the manor, as incident and appendant thereto, by a grant of the manor only, without adding any other words. But where the property of the advowson has been once separated from the property of the manor by legal conveyance, it is called an advowson in gross, or at large, and never can be appendant any more; but it is for the future annexed to the person of its owner, and not to his manor or lands.

Advowsons are also either presentative, collative, or donative. An advowson presentative, is where the patron hath a right of presentation to the bishop or ordinary, and moreover to demand of him to institute his clerk if he finds him canonically qualified; and this is the most usual advowson. An advowson collative, is where the bishop and patron are one and the same person; in which case the bishop cannot present to himself; but he does, by the one act of collation, or conferring the benefice, the whole that is done in common cases, by both presentation and institution. An advowson donative, is when the king, or any subject by his licence, doth found a church or chapel, and ordains that it shall be merely in the gift or disposal of Patronage, the patron; subject to his visitation only, and not to that of the ordinary; and vested absolutely in the clerk by the patron's deed of donation, without presentation, institution, or induction. This is said to have been anciently the only way of conferring ecclesiastical benefices in England; the method of institution by the bishop not being established more early than the time of Archbishop Becket in the reign of Henry II. and therefore, though Pope Alexander III. in a letter to Becket, severely inveighs against the prava consecratio, as he calls it, of investiture conferred by the patron only, this however shows what was then the common usage. Others contend that the claim of the bishops to institution is as old as the first planting of Christianity in this island; and in proof of it they allege a letter from the English nobility to the pope in the reign of Henry the Third, recorded by Matthew Paris, which speaks of presentation to the bishop as a thing immemorial. The truth seems to be, that, where the benefice was to be conferred on a mere layman, he was first presented to the bishop in order to receive ordination, who was at liberty to examine and refuse him; but where the clerk was already in orders, the living was usually vested in him by the sole donation of the patron; till about the middle of the 12th century, when the pope and his bishops endeavoured to introduce a kind of feudal dominion over ecclesiastical benefices, and, in consequence of that, began to claim and exercise the right of institution universally, as a species of spiritual investiture.

However this may be, if, as the law now stands, the true patron once wavers this privilege of donation, and presents to the bishop, and his clerk is admitted and instituted, the advowson is now become for every presentative, and shall never be donative any more. For these exceptions to general rules and common right are ever looked upon by the law in an unfavourable view, and construed as strictly as possible. If therefore the patron, in whom such peculiar right resides, does once give up that right, the law, which loves uniformity, will interpret it to be done with an intention of giving it up forever; and will therefore reduce it to the standard of other ecclesiastical livings. See further, Law, Part III. Sect. v. N° clix. 5—10.

Arms of PATRONAGE, in Heraldry, are those on the top of which are some marks of subjection and dependence; thus the city of Paris lately bore the fleurs-de-lis in chief, to show her subjection to the king; and the cardinals, on the top of their arms, bear those of the pope, who gave them the hat, to show that they are his creatures.