apparitor
Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- noun An official who was formerly sent to carry out the orders of a civil or ecclesiastical court.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- noun In Roman antiquity, any officer who attended magistrates and judges to execute their orders.
- noun Any officer of a civil court, or his servant or attendant.
- noun Any one who puts in an appearance; an appearer.
- noun Eccles., a messenger or an officer who serves the process of a spiritual court; the lowest officer of an ecclesiastical tribunal.
- noun The beadle in a university, who carries the mace.
Examples
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The apparitor is the ambassador of the law, and ambassadors are not subject to punishment, so that I do not know why you keep me under guard.
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I may observe, for example, the case of an apparitor sent to Borthwick from the Primate of Saint Andrews, to cite the lord of that castle, who was opposed by an Abbot of Unreason, at whose command the officer of the spiritual court was appointed to be ducked in a mill-dam, and obliged to eat up his parchment citation.
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In former days it denoted a sergeant, an apparitor, an officer who executed magisterial orders.
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Jeremy Stickles is my name, lad, nothing more than a poor apparitor of the worshipful Court of King’s Bench.
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After his defeat, when he (194) was ordered by the senate to name a dictator, making a sort of jest of the public disaster, he named Glycias, his apparitor.
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The apparitor, who was chosen on account of his strength of voice (the candidates for that office must be tested in this respect), had hard work that day.
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Basche went into the outward yard; there the catchpole meeting him fell on his marrow-bones, begged of him not to take it ill if he served him with a writ at the suit of the fat prior; and in a pathetic speech let him know that he was a public person, a servant to the monking tribe, apparitor to the abbatial mitre, ready to do as much for him, nay, for the least of his servants, whensoever he would employ and use him.
Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel
Note
The word 'apparitor' comes ultimately from a Latin word meaning 'to come into view, appear'.
