Definition
A Latin term from old legal practice meaning to scrape off or erase writing from a document or instrument. The act referred to the physical removal of text by scraping the surface of parchment or vellum — the standard writing materials of medieval legal practice — as distinguished from other forms of alteration such as interlineation or obliteration. The past participle form, abrasum, means "erased" or "scraped off" and appears in older legal instruments and pleadings to describe a document that has been so altered.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern English use; the root verb "abrade" survives in English meaning to wear away or scrape a surface, typically in physical or medical contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Abrade" — to rub or wear off; to waste by friction.
The common English descendant of this term carries no legal weight. In legal contexts, abradere was a precise term of art describing deliberate alteration of a written legal instrument, an act with significant legal consequences for the instrument's validity — not merely incidental surface wear.
Common Confusion
Abradere should not be conflated with interlineation (adding words between existing lines) or with rasura (a related term also describing erasure or scraping, sometimes used interchangeably in medieval sources but more often describing the resulting mark or trace left on the parchment). Researchers should also distinguish erasure as physical act from forgery or falsification as legal conclusions: the presence of an abrasum on a document raised evidentiary questions about validity but did not automatically establish fraudulent intent.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early common law sources. Researchers will encounter it in Latin-text pleadings, treatise discussions of documentary evidence, and cases touching on the authenticity of written instruments. Its practical significance was substantial: parchment-based documents could be physically scraped to remove and alter text, and courts developed rules for how to treat instruments bearing signs of erasure.
When working with sources citing Bracton or Fleta — the two principal authorities Burrill cites — researchers should understand that the treatment of erased instruments in those texts reflects 13th-century evidentiary practice, not modern rules. The concern was whether an erasure voided a deed or instrument entirely, raised a presumption of fraud, or was merely an innocuous correction. Later common law doctrine addressed erasures and alterations in instruments with considerable nuance, and the vocabulary shifted toward English terms. By the time of Blackstone and the later equity treatises, abradere as a term of art had largely given way to discussions of "erasure," "alteration," and "spoliation" in English.
Corpus researchers searching for authenticity and alteration doctrine in early sources should use abradere, abrasum, and rasura as search terms in tandem. Burrill's entry is thin precisely because the term's active legal life predates the main body of reported English case law; it belongs to the stratum of Bracton-era practice that requires Latin-language source competency.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the Law Mind shelf sources. The definition is terse but precise, correctly identifying the physical mechanism (scraping) and distinguishing it implicitly from other alteration methods. Burrill cites Bracton (fol. 413b) and Fleta (lib. 6, c. 50, § 2) — both genuine medieval legal treatises of the 13th century — as the primary loci for the term in practice.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Bouvier, Black's early editions) appear to carry this term as a main entry, reflecting its status as an archaic Latinate term superseded in living practice before those dictionaries were compiled. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a finding aid pointing toward the Bracton and Fleta passages rather than as a self-contained doctrinal account.