Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning to afforest — that is, to convert land into a royal forest, subjecting it to forest law and the jurisdiction of forest courts. The act of aforestare brought land under a distinct and highly restrictive legal regime administered by the Crown, limiting the rights of landowners and commoners to use, cultivate, or clear the affected territory. The term appears in Magna Carta (John, c. 47), which addressed the widespread grievance that the Crown had unlawfully extended forest boundaries and subjected previously free land to forest law without right.
Common Confusion
AFORESTARE is easily confused with ordinary afforestation in the modern environmental or agricultural sense — the planting of trees on previously unforested land. The legal meaning is almost the reverse in emphasis: aforestare was not about planting trees but about asserting Crown legal dominion over a territory. Land aforested might already have been wooded, or it might not have been. The operative act was the imposition of forest law, not any change to the physical landscape.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering aforestare in medieval English legal records should understand it as a term of constitutional conflict, not merely land management. The expansion of royal forests under the Norman and Angevin kings was one of the most significant grievances driving baronial opposition to the Crown, and Magna Carta's Chapter 47 — which required the immediate disafforestation of lands afforested by King John — reflects how politically charged this term was.
Three research traps apply:
First, Burrill's entry is a stub that points to afforestare as the primary form. Researchers should consult both spellings when searching historical sources, as Latin legal manuscripts vary in spelling and the prefix a- versus af- may reflect copyist variation rather than substantive distinction.
Second, the term belongs to a cluster of interrelated forest law vocabulary — afforestare, disafforestare, perambulation, regard, and the various forest offices — that only makes sense as a system. Isolating aforestare without understanding the broader forest law regime will produce incomplete analysis.
Third, Magna Carta c. 47 is the anchor citation. Any corpus source that reproduces or comments on Magna Carta's forest provisions is a primary location for this term in context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical shelf source for this term and provides only a cross-reference entry, directing readers to afforestare and citing Magna Carta (John, c. 47) as the documentary authority. This brevity is not surprising: aforestare is a highly technical term from a defunct legal regime, and even comprehensive 19th-century legal dictionaries treated forest law as largely antiquarian material by that point.
What Burrill does not provide — and what researchers should seek elsewhere — is any account of how aforestare functioned procedurally: who had authority to afforest, what legal consequences attached, how disputes over unlawful afforestation were adjudicated, or how the disafforestation provisions of Magna Carta were actually implemented. For that material, the forest law treatises and the records of the forest eyre courts are the relevant sources, not the dictionary tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
Aforestare is a term specific to medieval English law and the royal forest system established after the Norman Conquest. It has no operative counterpart in Scots law, civil law systems, or American law. For research purposes, its relevance is confined to English legal history and the interpretation of sources from roughly the 12th through 17th centuries.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Forest Law
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Magna Carta
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Royal Forests