Definition
In old English law, a scraping or erasure made on a written instrument — specifically, the physical act of scraping away ink or parchment surface to remove or alter written text. The term refers both to the act of scraping and to the mark or defacement left behind on a document. Functionally synonymous with rasure, rasura denotes one of the earliest recognized forms of documentary fraud or alteration, distinguishable from interlineation (writing between existing lines) and from simple obliteration.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in current general use; treated as an archaic or technical term with no standard modern entry.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently listed; subsumed under "rasure" or "raze," meaning to scrape, shave, or obliterate.
The term has no meaningful foothold in modern ordinary English. Its legal relevance is entirely historical, tied to the evidentiary treatment of physical manuscript documents. Researchers should not expect to encounter it outside of medieval or early modern legal sources.
Common Confusion
RASURA vs. RASURE: The two forms are used interchangeably in historical sources. Rasura is the Latin form; rasure is the anglicized variant. Burrill cross-references the two without treating them as distinct legal concepts. Researchers will find both spellings in early English legal texts and should treat them as the same term.
RASURA vs. INTERLINEATION: Both are forms of instrument alteration, but rasura involves removing existing text by scraping, while interlineation involves adding new text between existing lines. The legal consequences could differ depending on the nature of the alteration and the intent behind it.
RASURA vs. OBLITERATION: Obliteration typically refers to covering or blotting out text rather than scraping the writing surface. In historical manuscript practice, the distinction mattered because rasura left a physically detectible trace on the parchment — a thinning or roughening of the surface — whereas obliteration might leave the underlying text partially legible.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter rasura almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal materials — plea rolls, chancery records, year books, and treatises on the law of evidence relating to deeds and charters. The term is a marker of the era when legal instruments were written on parchment and physical inspection of the document surface was itself a form of evidentiary inquiry.
The primary corpus connection is to the law of alteration of instruments and the broader question of what effect a material alteration had on a deed's validity. An unexplained rasura on a deed could render it void or suspect — courts and legal writers treated an apparent scraping as evidence of tampering unless the alteration could be accounted for. This concern is reflected in Fleta (the late 13th-century Latin legal treatise cited by Burrill), which addresses the conditions under which alterations vitiate instruments.
Trap for historical researchers: The significance of rasura fades almost entirely from legal discourse as paper displaced parchment and as instruments became subject to formal attestation and registration requirements. By the 19th century, alteration doctrine had evolved into a more generalized framework focused on material alteration regardless of method, and the specific vocabulary of rasura had dropped from active use. Researchers working with alteration cases from the 19th century onward will not find this term but should recognize that the underlying doctrine descends from the same root concern.
Corpus connections: Researchers pursuing this term should also examine entries and sources touching on deed execution formalities, the law of evidence as applied to ancient documents, and the general doctrine of alteration of written instruments. The Fleta citation in Burrill is one of the few surviving signposts to primary source treatment of rasura as a distinct legal event.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term, and his entry is deliberately spare: he defines rasura by reference to the anglicized synonym rasure and anchors the term in Fleta, book 4, chapter 10, sections 3 and 4. This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of deeply archaic Latin law terms — he provides the linguistic derivation (from Latin radere, to scrape), confirms the English legal context, and points to a primary source rather than elaborating doctrine.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any extended treatment of how rasura functioned as an evidentiary matter — how courts determined whether a scraping was material, who bore the burden of explanation, or what remedies attached. That doctrinal content must be recovered from the primary sources themselves, particularly Fleta and comparable treatises of the period.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: ALTERATION OF INSTRUMENTS