Definition
Abbrochment is an archaic term from English law referring to the practice of forestalling a market or fair — that is, intercepting or buying up goods before they reach a public market, with the purpose of controlling supply and raising prices. It belongs to a family of medieval commercial offenses designed to protect the integrity of open-market trading and prevent manipulation of prices to the detriment of ordinary buyers.
Common Confusion
Abbrochment, forestalling, regrating, and engrossing are four distinct but closely related medieval market offenses that are routinely conflated in general historical writing and even in some legal dictionaries. Forestalling is the broadest category, encompassing any act of intercepting market goods or discouraging sellers from attending a market. Abbrochment is best understood as a specific form of forestalling — the physical interception of goods or traders before they reach the fair or market. Regrating involves buying goods at market and reselling them at higher prices at the same or nearby market. Engrossing involves buying up large quantities of a commodity to corner the supply. A researcher should not treat these terms as interchangeable when precision about the specific offense is required.
Why It Matters in Research
Abbrochment is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in historical English legal sources and in dictionaries covering early common law. It has no meaningful modern legal application and does not appear in contemporary statutes or case law. Its primary research value is contextual: understanding abbrochment illuminates the broader medieval regulatory framework governing markets, which included closely related offenses such as forestalling, regrating, and engrossing. These terms are frequently used together in historical sources, and a researcher encountering one will typically need to understand all of them to grasp the full picture of pre-modern market regulation.
Researchers should be alert to two traps. First, because abbrochment is an uncommon variant spelling and a narrower term, it is easy to overlook in indexes and digests that organize related material under the more common heading of forestalling. Second, the offense was largely absorbed into, and eventually abolished alongside, the broader forestalling offenses by the nineteenth century; sources written after that period may treat the entire family of offenses as defunct without separately noting abbrochment by name.
The term has no significant jurisdictional variation in American law — it was never adopted as a distinct legal category in U.S. jurisdictions and exists in American legal dictionaries only as a historical curiosity imported from English sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines abbrochment tersely as "[o]ld Eng. law. The forestalling of a market or fair," effectively treating it as a synonym for forestalling in its most specific market-manipulation sense. Bouvier adds no elaboration, which is itself informative: by the mid-nineteenth century, when Bouvier compiled his dictionary, the term was already of purely antiquarian interest and carried no active legal weight.
What Bouvier's entry does not convey is the specific character of the act — namely, the interception of goods or sellers before they arrive at market, as distinct from regrating (buying and reselling in the same market) or engrossing (buying up large quantities to create a monopoly). Historical sources treating market offenses comprehensively, such as Coke's writings on common law and early treatises on trade regulation, give abbrochment its fuller meaning as a spatial and temporal forestalling: the interceptor goes out to meet the seller before the market opens, thereby diverting goods away from the public trading place entirely.
No significant divergence exists among historical dictionaries on this term, largely because so few address it at length. The brevity of available treatments reflects the term's early disappearance from active legal use.