Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "appearance," used in early English legal records and Year Books to denote a party's appearance before a court or tribunal. The term is not a recognized term of art in modern law and does not carry independent legal weight today. It survives only as a variant spelling encountered in historical legal manuscripts and reports, functioning as the Law French equivalent of the Latin term *comparuitio* or the later English term "appearance."
In the contexts where it appears, *apparance* refers to the act of a party presenting themselves — in person or through counsel — before a judicial authority in response to a summons, writ, or other process. Failure to make apparance in early English procedure could result in default, judgment by non-appearance, or outlawry, depending on the nature of the proceeding.
---
Common Confusion
APPARANCE is easily confused with APPARENS, a related but distinct Latin term. Burrill's entry itself directs the reader from *apparance* to *Apparens*, signaling that the two terms, while related in root and subject matter, were treated as separate entries in the historical legal vocabulary. APPARENS carries its own substantive legal meaning (roughly, "appearing" or "evident") and should not be treated as synonymous with APPARANCE. Researchers encountering either term in historical documents should verify which form is actually present before drawing interpretive conclusions.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a navigational hazard for researchers working in early English legal sources — Year Books, plea rolls, and related medieval and early modern records. Several practical points:
**Spelling variation.** The Law French corpus is notorious for inconsistent orthography. *Apparance* may appear as *appearance*, *apparaunce*, *apperaunce*, or other variants across different manuscripts and printed editions. A researcher searching digitized historical sources for a single spelling will miss occurrences under others.
**Dead-end entries.** Burrill's entry for *apparance* is deliberately minimal — it functions as a redirect rather than a substantive definition. This pattern is common in historical legal dictionaries and signals that the term was understood by the compilers to be subordinate to another headword. Researchers should follow such redirects rather than treating the stub entry as the full account of the term's meaning.
**Distinguishing procedural appearance from apparent authority.** Modern legal usage has largely abandoned *apparance* as a spelling, but the conceptual family it belongs to — appearance, apparency, apparent — remains active in multiple doctrinal areas, including procedural law (entry of appearance) and agency law (apparent authority). These modern concepts are related in etymology but are not direct descendants of the term in its historical procedural sense. Do not import modern doctrine into historical analysis of *apparance* without verifying continuity of meaning.
**Year Book citations.** Burrill cites 2 Inst. 479, Jenk. Cent. 207, and Vaugh. 169 — sources associated with Coke's *Institutes*, Jenkins's *Centuries of Reports*, and Vaughan's *Reports*, respectively. These are genuine early English legal texts. Researchers consulting these sources for context should be aware that the surrounding procedural framework differs substantially from modern civil procedure.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides only a stub entry for *apparance*, defining it as the Law French word for "appearance" and immediately noting that the term does not independently exist as a term of art — redirecting the reader to *Apparens*. The citation string (2 Inst. 479; Jenk. Yearb. 8 Hen. VI. 16; Cent. 207; Vaugh. 169) establishes that the term was in use in Year Book-era practice and was recognized by the major institutional writers, but Burrill treats it as an orthographic or linguistic variant rather than a doctrine in its own right.
No other sources in the Law Mind shelf carry a dedicated entry for *apparance*. This absence is itself informative: by the time the major nineteenth-century dictionaries were compiled, the Law French form had been fully displaced by the English "appearance," and historical dictionaries that addressed the concept at all did so under the anglicized heading.
---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Agency — Authority of Agents (Actual, Apparent, and Inherent), The Law Mind Business Organizations & Corporate Law Encyclopedia. Note: the connection is etymological and conceptual rather than doctrinal — the encyclopedia entry addresses *apparent authority* in modern agency law, which shares a root with *apparance* but developed along a distinct legal path. Consult for contrast, not for direct continuity with the historical procedural term.
---