Definition
Abbroachment (also spelled "abbroach-ment") is the act of forestalling a market by purchasing goods wholesale — typically before they reach the market — with the intent to resell them at retail for profit. The offense was directed at those who intercepted merchandise intended for open sale, thereby manipulating supply and price to the disadvantage of ordinary buyers.
Abbroachment is a variant term for, or subspecies of, the broader common law offense of forestalling. Where forestalling encompassed a range of market-distorting conduct (including intercepting goods on the road to market or persuading sellers not to bring goods to market), abbroachment referred more specifically to the wholesale purchase of goods as the mechanism of that interception.
Common Confusion
Abbroachment, forestalling, regrating, and engrossing are four related but distinct common law market offenses that appear together in historical sources and are frequently conflated. Forestalling is the parent category — any act that prevents goods from reaching an open market. Abbroachment is forestalling accomplished by wholesale purchase. Regrating is buying goods at a market and reselling them at a profit at the same or a nearby market. Engrossing is buying up large quantities of a commodity to create a monopoly on future supply. Researchers encountering any of these terms in historical records should check all four, as period sources use them inconsistently and sometimes interchangeably.
Why It Matters in Research
Abbroachment is almost exclusively a historical term. It has no meaningful presence in modern statutory or case law and will not appear in contemporary legal materials. Researchers will encounter it primarily in:
— Medieval and early modern English legal records, where forestalling offenses were actively prosecuted;
— Historical treatises on market regulation and trade law;
— Early American legal materials that carried forward common law market offenses from English sources before they fell into disuse.
The term's spelling is unstable across historical sources. Variants include "abbroach-ment," "abroachment," and "abbroach." Black's 2nd ed. Supplemental uses the hyphenated form "abbroach-ment." Researchers searching manuscript records or early print sources should not rely on a single spelling.
The offense itself reflects a pre-industrial conception of market fairness — the assumption that open markets with direct producer-to-consumer sale protected buyers from price manipulation. As wholesale trade, commodity markets, and retail distribution became normalized features of commercial life, prosecutions for forestalling and its variants declined sharply and were eventually abolished in England by statute. In the United States, these common law offenses were never systematically adopted and had largely disappeared from active legal use by the nineteenth century.
The practical research trap: a researcher working on the history of antitrust, price-fixing, or market regulation may find abbroachment cited as a common law ancestor of modern competition law concerns. The doctrinal line is real but loose — modern antitrust law developed from distinct statutory and economic foundations, and abbroachment should not be read as a direct precedent without careful attention to the intervening history.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd ed., Supplemental) defines abbroachment as "the act of forestalling a market, by buying up at wholesale the merchandise intended to be sold there, for the purpose of selling it at retail," and cross-references forestalling. This is the only entry in the Law Mind shelf sources for this term.
The definition is functional but minimal. Black's does not distinguish abbroachment from the related offenses of engrossing and regrating, nor does it situate the term within the historical arc of market regulation law. Earlier English legal dictionaries — particularly Termes de la Ley and Cowell's Interpreter — treated forestalling offenses with more detail, though the term "abbroachment" itself appears less frequently than "forestalling" in those sources, suggesting it was always a secondary or regional variant rather than a term of central legal art.