Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning to abut — that is, to border upon or be contiguous to another parcel of land. Used in medieval conveyancing and pleading to describe the physical relationship between adjacent properties, particularly the point at which one tract of land meets or terminates against another. The term appears in its participial form, abuttans, meaning abutting or lying against.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively a dead term in active legal usage, surviving only in historical records and pleading forms. Researchers encountering it in old English conveyances, writs, or property descriptions should understand it as the formal Latin expression of what modern practice handles through metes-and-bounds descriptions or references to adjoining owners. In medieval and early modern pleading, precise description of abuttals — the boundaries of a parcel as defined by what it abutted on each side — was a standard and sometimes mandatory component of real property actions. A failure to adequately plead abuttals could be grounds for challenge.
The term connects directly to the wider vocabulary of boundary description in old English law, including abuttals (the list of adjoining properties on each side of a parcel), which appears frequently in feoffments, fines, and recoveries. Researchers working in the Year Books, early Chancery records, or pre-modern conveyancing instruments will encounter abuttare and abuttans as routine technical language rather than as terms of art carrying independent legal weight. The significance lies in the descriptive function, not in any substantive legal rule attached to the word itself.
Be alert to the distinction between abuttare (to abut, a verb form) and abuttals (the noun form listing the boundaries). Historical sources sometimes use them interchangeably in translation, which can blur the analytical distinction between the act of bordering and the formal recitation of boundaries in a pleading or deed.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, citing Spelman's Glossary and Townshend on Pleading (Towns. Pl. 26, 49) as authority. Burrill's treatment is minimal — appropriately so, given that abuttare is a mechanical term of pleading rather than a concept requiring extended definition. Spelman is the expected reference for medievally-derived Latin legal vocabulary, and Townshend's citation grounds the term in actual pleading practice rather than purely antiquarian usage.
No significant divergence exists across historical sources on this term. Its meaning was stable and narrow: it described physical adjacency of land. What historical dictionaries do not address — and what researchers should supply from context — is the procedural consequence of abuttal descriptions in specific forms of action, which varied by the type of writ or conveyancing instrument involved.
Jurisdictional Note
Abuttare is a term of old English law with no distinct American development. Where American courts or conveyancers used equivalent language, they did so through the Anglicized forms abutting and abuttals rather than the Latin. The concept persists in modern American property law under those English forms.