Definition
The abuttals of a parcel of land are the descriptions of its boundaries showing what other lands, roads, highways, or other features it touches or adjoins on each side — typically expressed by cardinal direction (east, west, north, south). The term identifies the neighboring properties or features against which a given tract presses or terminates, and appears most often in deeds, surveys, and conveyancing instruments as part of the metes-and-bounds description of land.
Why It Matters in Research
Abuttals is essentially a historical conveyancing term. Researchers encountering it will almost always be working with older deed language, colonial-era land grants, or English common law property materials rather than modern instruments, which use standardized metes-and-bounds or platted-lot descriptions instead.
The practical research trap is reading abuttals in isolation from its companion term, boundings. Historical deeds often used the phrase "buttings and boundings" as a unit, meaning the full boundary description — the abuttals being the directional neighbors and the boundings being the limits or termination points. Separating them can cause a researcher to miss that a document is presenting a complete boundary clause, not two distinct concepts.
In the Law Mind corpus, abuttals will surface in property law materials, treatises on conveyancing, colonial land records, and English common law digests. It connects directly to the broader vocabulary of land description: abut, abutting owner, metes and bounds, and the doctrine governing boundary disputes. Researchers tracing property disputes in early American or English courts should expect to encounter the term in pleadings and deeds of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) carry identical definitions, each tracing the term to Cowell's legal dictionary and Tomlin's law dictionary — a lineage that signals the term's deep roots in English common law property practice. The quoted definition — "the buttings and boundings of lands, east, west, north, and south, showing on what other lands, highways, or places they abut, or are limited and bounded" — is more a description of function than a formal legal test, which reflects how the term operated: as a term of conveyancing art rather than a term with doctrinal content.
Neither edition elaborates on contested meaning, jurisdictional variation, or case law, suggesting that abuttals never generated significant litigation over its own definition. Its legal work was done silently, inside deed descriptions, rather than in courtroom arguments about what the word meant. Historical sources are consistent but thin; the term did not evolve so much as it simply fell out of active use as land description practices modernized.