Definition
The physical act of scraping, scratching, or shaving the surface of a written instrument to remove letters, words, or other content. In legal usage, rasure refers specifically to the mechanical removal of writing from a document — by abrading or cutting away the surface material — as distinguished from covering or crossing out the writing. Because rasure physically destroys part of the document's surface, it is one of the recognized modes by which a deed or other formal instrument may be avoided, rendered void, or called into question as to its authenticity.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Scraping the surface of parchment or similar material to erase something; erasure more generally; also obliteration or destruction; or, separately, the shaving of the head (tonsure).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of rasing, scraping, or erasing; erasure or obliteration. Also, a mark left where a letter, word, or part of a writing has been erased, effaced, or obliterated.
The common definitions capture the physical act accurately, but they miss the legal weight: in law, rasure is not simply a neutral correction. It is a form of alteration that can invalidate a deed, raise a presumption of fraud, or void an instrument entirely — consequences entirely absent from the everyday sense of the word.
Common Confusion
RASURE vs. OBLITERATION: Both terms describe the removal or destruction of writing, and the historical sources acknowledge that they are frequently used interchangeably. The technical distinction is meaningful: rasure removes the written surface by scraping, leaving no readable text and often a visible physical disturbance in the material; obliteration crosses out or covers writing with ink, leaving the original marks potentially visible beneath. In practice, courts and older treatises did not always maintain this distinction, and researchers should not assume precision in historical usage.
RASURE vs. ALTERATION: Rasure is one species of alteration. All rasures are alterations, but not all alterations are rasures. The broader category of alteration encompasses interlineation (inserting words between lines), erasure, obliteration, and addition.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with cases involving challenged deeds, wills, or contracts in historical sources will encounter rasure as a term of legal consequence, not merely description. Under common law doctrine reflected in Blackstone and the early treatise literature, a material rasure in a deed could render the instrument void — not merely voidable — even if the alteration was innocent. This harsh rule, traceable through the sources Burrill cites (Sheppard's Touchstone, Fleta), was applied most strictly to deeds and formal instruments.
Two traps await researchers in the historical corpus. First, the interchangeable use of rasure and obliteration (acknowledged even in Black's) means you cannot assume the historical writer is using the term with technical precision. Second, the legal consequences of rasure evolved over time: the strict common law rule voiding deeds on material rasure was softened in many American courts, particularly when the alteration was shown to be immaterial or unauthorized by a third party rather than a party to the instrument. Cases turning on this distinction will use varied vocabulary across jurisdictions and periods.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law dispatches the term with a bare cross-reference to ALTERATION, signaling that by the late 19th century at least one authority treated rasure as subsumed within the broader alteration framework. This is a useful compass bearing: when researching historical instruments cases, check both the rasure entries and the alteration entries in your sources, as doctrine and terminology migrated between them.
The term is rare in modern legal writing, having been largely replaced by erasure or alteration. Encountering rasure in a document strongly suggests a pre-20th-century source or a source drawing on older common law tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five source dictionaries largely agree on the core physical act — scraping or scratching a written surface to remove content — but diverge in emphasis and utility. Black's (both editions) provides the clearest doctrinal note, distinguishing rasure from obliteration while acknowledging common interchange between the terms. Burrill is the most historically grounded, tracing the word through Latin and Law French, situating it within common law deed doctrine via Blackstone and Sheppard's Touchstone, and noting explicitly that rasure can render an instrument void. Bouvier offers a compact, slightly broader definition that extends to printed documents as well as handwritten ones — a useful expansion. Anderson adds nothing substantively, treating rasure as a redirect to alteration. None of the sources address the evolution of the strict voidance rule or its American reception, leaving researchers to pursue that development through case law and treatise commentary beyond these dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The strict common law rule that a material rasure voids a deed was not uniformly adopted across American states. Some jurisdictions retained the harsh rule; others applied a more flexible inquiry into whether the alteration was material and by whom it was made. Researchers should verify the applicable state rule before drawing inferences from English common law sources.