Definition
To lean upon; to rest or support oneself against something. A Latin term appearing in old English legal records, used to describe the physical act of leaning or resting upon a thing — whether a wall, boundary marker, or other fixed object. The term carries no standalone substantive legal meaning but appears as descriptive language in ancient record-keeping, particularly in contexts involving property boundaries, encroachments, or the physical relationship between a structure and an adjoining feature.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear only in medieval and early modern English legal records, rolls, and surveys — not in modern legal instruments. Researchers encountering appodiare in a property dispute record, perambulation, or boundary description should treat it as physical description rather than a term of art conferring rights or obligations. Its presence signals a document of considerable age and likely Latin drafting conventions drawn from ecclesiastical or manorial practice.
The term is rare enough that it will not appear in most standard legal dictionaries. Its absence from later dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's) confirms it fell out of use without spawning a recognizable English equivalent in legal drafting. Researchers working in land records, particularly those involving easements of support, party walls, or boundary monuments, may encounter appodiare as a precursor concept to what later became legally structured doctrines — but the term itself carries no doctrinal weight.
Because Burrill traces the term through Spelman's Glossarium (Henry Spelman's seventeenth-century glossary of medieval Latin legal terms), researchers who need fuller context should go to Spelman directly. Burrill's entry is derivative and brief.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only shelf-source entry for this term, defining it as "to lean upon" with Latin equivalents incumbere, inclinare, and inniti in rem aliquam — meaning to press upon, to incline toward, or to rest weight upon a thing. Burrill credits Spelman as the authority, which places the term squarely in the tradition of Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum, a reference for Latin terms found in English records from the medieval period onward.
No competing or divergent definitions exist across the standard historical dictionaries because the term does not appear in Bouvier, Black's, or Tomlin's. This is not surprising: appodiare is a descriptive Latin verb of the kind that filled medieval records but was never elevated into a term of legal doctrine. It describes a fact — physical leaning or support — rather than a legal status or right.
The Latin roots point toward physical incumbency or pressure upon an object, a concept that would later be absorbed into property law through doctrines of lateral support, easements of support, and party wall rights, though no direct doctrinal lineage should be assumed from the word alone.