Definition
A term from early English law denoting a liberty or freedom from amercements — that is, an exemption from monetary penalties imposed by a court or lord. When the word appeared in a grant, it carried a dual operation: the grantee was freed from amercements personally, and simultaneously acquired the right to collect the forfeitures and amercements of others within the granted jurisdiction. The term is also rendered as abishersing.
Common Confusion
The second edition of Black's Law Dictionary contains what appears to be a misplaced entry under this headword — the text defines the phrase "abide by" in the context of arbitration bonds, attributing meaning to that phrase through New Hampshire and Maine case law. That content belongs to a separate term and has no connection to abishering. Researchers encountering the 2nd edition entry should disregard it as a printing or editorial error and rely on the 1st edition for the actual definition.
Why It Matters in Research
Abishering is a term of almost exclusively antiquarian significance. Researchers will encounter it primarily in two contexts: transcriptions or analyses of medieval English grants and charters, and glossaries or legal dictionaries from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. It will not appear in modern statutory or case law.
The term's instability is a practical research trap. Spelman and other early legal antiquarians treated abishering as a corruption or variant of mishering, mishersing, or miskering — terms with overlapping but not identical meanings in the feudal penalty framework. A researcher tracing a specific grant that uses this word should not assume it is interchangeable with amercement in all respects; the liberty aspect (the right to receive others' forfeitures) is equally operative and may be the more legally significant half of the grant's effect.
Spelling variation is extreme. Historical sources render this term across at least six variants. Corpus searches should account for abishering, abishersing, mishering, mishersing, miskering, and possible manuscript contractions. Relying on a single spelling in a full-text search will produce incomplete results.
The connection to amercement is the live research thread. Where abishering appears in a historical grant, the researcher's next step is to understand the amercement system of the relevant period and jurisdiction — how amercements were assessed, who had standing to collect them, and what the grant of their collection meant for local jurisdictional power.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's 1st edition is the primary source here and gives the most usable account. It correctly identifies the term's double function — personal exemption plus collection right — and flags the variant spellings attributed to Spelman. This is consistent with how Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum treated cognate terms in the feudal penalty vocabulary.
The 2nd edition entry is effectively useless for this term due to the apparent editorial error described above. No substantive definition of abishering appears in that edition's text as reproduced.
Historical legal dictionaries generally treat abishering as a curiosity rather than a working term, which reflects its status accurately. By the time systematic English legal dictionaries were being compiled, the term had already passed out of practical use. What the historical sources miss is any clear account of how frequently the word appeared in actual grants versus how often it was simply repeated from one glossary to the next — a distinction that matters for researchers trying to assess whether a given historical usage reflects living legal practice or learned antiquarianism.