Definition
Behavior or conduct. The term appears almost exclusively in the phrase "good abearance," which is the older form of "good behavior" used in recognizances. A recognizance to be of good abearance is a formal undertaking, recorded before a magistrate or court, by which a person binds themselves to conduct themselves peaceably and lawfully for a specified period, typically under penalty of forfeiture of a sum certain.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Behavior.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Behavior. [Obs.]
Both common and legal meanings resolve to the same word — behavior — but the legal meaning is narrower in practice. Outside of law, abearance was simply a synonym for behavior or conduct; within legal usage, it functioned almost exclusively in the set phrase "good abearance" within recognizance instruments. The term carried procedural weight in that context that the ordinary English meaning does not convey.
Why It Matters in Research
ABEARANCE is a term researchers will encounter only in historical sources — English common law materials, early American court records, and treatises rooted in Blackstone. It does not appear in modern statutes or contemporary legal usage. Its sole practical significance is as a variant of "good behavior" in recognizance instruments.
Researchers working with colonial-era or early republic court records should recognize that a bond or recognizance referencing "good abearance" is functionally identical to a modern good-behavior bond. Searching for this term in historical corpus materials requires attention to spelling variants: abearance, abearaunce, and bearance all appear in period sources. Do not assume silence on this term in a later source means the underlying concept is absent — it will simply be rendered as "good behavior" by the early nineteenth century.
The connection to Blackstone's Commentaries is direct and consistent across all dictionary sources. Blackstone uses the term in Book IV in his discussion of preventive justice, specifically the practice of requiring persons suspected of future misconduct to enter into recognizances. Researchers tracing the history of preventive detention, surety of the peace, or good-behavior bonds should treat ABEARANCE as a jurisdictional and temporal marker pointing toward pre-nineteenth-century English and American sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in complete agreement: Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence all define the term identically as "behavior" or "conduct" and locate its operative meaning in the phrase "good abearance" as used in recognizances. All cite Blackstone's Commentaries Book IV at pages 251 and 256 as the authoritative source, with no divergence.
The uniformity is itself informative. These dictionaries are not synthesizing competing authorities — they are all tracing the term to a single source, Blackstone, which signals that abearance had no independent life in American legal development. It entered American legal dictionaries as a historical artifact rather than as a term in active circulation.
Webster's 1913 marks it as obsolete, and Wiktionary carries only a bare synonym, confirming the term had fallen entirely out of ordinary English use by the modern period. No source identifies a distinct legal meaning beyond the Blackstone reference.