The free surface effect on the grain crystallography and morphology during recrystallization has been studied in stable Goss {110}<001> and brass {110}<112> - oriented single crystals of Al-1%wt.Mn alloy. The samples were plane strain compressed up to a strain of about 0.5 to develop a homogeneous structure comprising two sets of symmetrical microbands and then lightly annealed. The variation of recrystallization after annealing was then analysed by optical microscopy and SEM/EBSD on different cross-sections. The results are discussed in terms of the misorientation angle and axis distributions. The free surface provokes high frequency nucleation leading to a small grain size compared to internal sections of the bulk sample. However, the free surface and surface 'quality' do not modify the orientations of the recrystallized grains, i.e. similar groups of recrystallized grain orientations were observed for all sections. This leads to a strong misorientation relation between deformed/recovered area orientations and the limited number of groups of recrystallized grain orientations, basically the same as those observed during bulk recrystallization of similar crystals.