Definition
A Latin term of medieval legal pleading meaning "abutted" or "abutting upon" — that is, sharing a boundary or lying adjacent to a named piece of land. Used in old pleading to describe the positional relationship of one parcel of land to another, indicating that the land in question bordered or terminated at a specified boundary, road, watercourse, or neighboring property.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the specialized vocabulary of early English real property pleading, where precise identification of land by its abuttals — its boundary relationships to surrounding features and parcels — was a formal requirement. Researchers working in medieval and early modern land records, plea rolls, or pleading manuals will encounter this Latinized form where modern documents would simply describe the boundaries of a parcel by metes and bounds or by reference to a recorded plat.
The practical research trap is treating ABUTTALATUS as an exotic or isolated term when it is simply the past participial form used in formal pleading of the broader family of abuttals vocabulary. A document that recites land as *abuttalatus* against a road or a neighbor's field is performing the same function as the English "abutting upon" in a modern deed — but the Latin form signals that the document originates in a pleading context, not merely a conveyancing one. Researchers should look for the surrounding pleading formula to understand whether the purpose is to identify the land sued upon, land conveyed, or land described in a boundary dispute.
The term also signals the antiquity of a source. Its presence is a reliable indicator that a document predates the shift away from Latin pleading forms in English courts — a transition that occurred in stages and was substantially complete in English common law courts by the mid-eighteenth century, though Latin forms persisted longer in some ecclesiastical and local records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary records ABUTTALATUS with the terse entry: "L. Lat. In old pleading. Abuttalled." Burrill cites Townshend's Precedents of Pleading (p. 26) as authority, situating the term firmly in the technical pleading literature rather than in substantive property law. This is consistent with the term's function: it is a word of pleading form, not a term of legal art carrying substantive content. Burrill's entry is characteristically spare, but its citation to Townshend is useful — that work is a primary source for the pleading conventions of the period and would provide exemplars of the term in context.
No other Law Mind shelf source independently treats this term, which itself reflects the narrowness of its use. The term is not absent from legal history because it was unimportant in its time, but because it belongs to a layer of procedural Latin that later dictionaries had little occasion to preserve once Latin pleading fell out of practice.
Jurisdictional Note
ABUTTALATUS is a term of English common law pleading and appears primarily in English records. American colonial courts that adopted English pleading forms may contain the term in early records, but its appearance in American sources would be confined to the colonial and earliest federal periods.