Definition
An Old French legal term meaning surplusage — that is, excess or superfluous matter in a pleading or other legal instrument. Where a document contained more than was necessary or legally required, the surplus portion was termed abondance. The concept carried the implication that the excess material was either harmless and to be disregarded, or potentially prejudicial depending on its character.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Alternative form of "abundance" — a very plentiful or over-sufficient quantity of something.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately listed; "abundance" is defined as an overflowing fullness, ample sufficiency, great plenty.
The common and legal meanings share the same root sense of excess or overflow, but the legal context is narrowly procedural. In ordinary English, abundance carries a positive connotation of plentiful supply. In Old French legal practice, abondance was a term of art identifying surplus pleading matter — with neutral to negative implications, since surplusage could create ambiguity, introduce unnecessary issues, or expose a pleading to technical attack.
Common Confusion
Researchers should not conflate abondance with surplusage as a general modern doctrine. The term is purely historical and appears in the specific context of Year Book pleading practice. Modern surplusage doctrine — the rule that unnecessary matter in a pleading is ignored rather than fatal — descends conceptually from the same tradition but operates under different vocabulary and analytical frameworks. Using abondance as a search term in modern legal databases will not surface surplusage doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
Abondance is encountered almost exclusively in Year Book sources and the dictionaries and treatises that drew on them. Burrill's citation to Yearb. P. 7 Hen. VI. 12 places the term firmly in early fifteenth-century English common law pleading practice. Researchers working with Year Book materials or tracing the history of pleading doctrine — particularly the treatment of surplus matter — may encounter this term and should recognize it as a precursor concept to the later surplusage doctrine codified in common law and eventually in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
The principal research trap is terminological: the word will not appear in modern indices or digests. Researchers working backward from modern surplusage doctrine who wish to find its doctrinal lineage must shift vocabulary when entering Old French and early Law French sources. Burrill's entry is thin, providing a single citation with no analytical elaboration, which means the researcher must go directly to Year Book sources or secondary scholarship on pleading history for fuller context.
There is no meaningful jurisdictional variation to track for this term — it is a historical artifact, not a term in current use in any common law jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary treatment identified. The entry is minimal: a language tag (L. Fr.), a practice context (old practice), a one-word definition (surplusage), and a single Year Book citation. Burrill does not elaborate on the procedural consequences of abondance or distinguish cases where surplus matter was disregarded from cases where it was treated as harmful. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — including Jacob, Tomlin, or Bouvier — appear to carry this term, which suggests it was already archaic by the time the major English-language legal dictionaries were compiled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The absence of the term from those later dictionaries is itself informative: it marks the point at which the underlying concept migrated fully into the English vocabulary of surplusage and ceased to be referenced under its Old French form.