Definition
An offense under English forest law consisting of the destruction of trees and undergrowth within a royal forest by pulling them up from the roots, with the intent or effect of converting forest land into arable ground. Unlike mere waste — which involved cutting down trees in ways that allowed regrowth — assart was the permanent elimination of cover, rendering the land incapable of returning to forest. The distinction was legally significant: assart was the graver offense because it permanently diminished the forest and, with it, the deer and game the Crown had a proprietary interest in protecting.
The term also referred secondarily to the parcel of land itself once it had been cleared — that is, the resulting clearing or assart land.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To clear forest land for agriculture; remove stumps.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act or offense of grubbing up trees and bushes, and thus destroying the thickets or coverts of a forest. Also, a piece of land cleared of trees and bushes and fitted for cultivation; a clearing.
The common and legal definitions share the same core activity — uprooting trees to convert forest to arable land — but diverge in emphasis. Ordinary usage describes assart as an agricultural act; the legal meaning frames it as an offense against the Crown's forest rights. The same physical act that a farmer might call improvement, the forest law treated as destruction of royal property.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Two senses appear consistently in the historical sources:
Assart as offense: The unlawful act of rooting up trees and destroying coverts within a royal forest without license. This was the primary legal meaning and was triable in the courts of the forest.
Assart as land: The physical parcel resulting from the clearing. This secondary usage — assart land or simply an assart — appears in conveyancing and land records of the medieval and early modern period, where parcels were identified by their origin as cleared forest.
Why It Matters in Research
Assart is an archaism with no living legal analog in American law, but it appears frequently enough in historical English records — manorial documents, forest court proceedings, plea rolls, and land grants — that researchers working in medieval or early modern English legal history will encounter it. Several practical notes:
The forest courts that tried assart offenses operated under a parallel jurisdiction to the common law courts. Sources dealing with assart will often originate in forest eyre records rather than in the Year Books or common law reports. Researchers unfamiliar with the distinction between forest law and common law may misread these jurisdictional signals.
The dual meaning of assart (offense vs. resulting parcel of land) creates potential ambiguity in historical documents. A deed referencing "an assart of twenty acres" is describing land by its origin, not alleging a crime. Context — whether the document is judicial or conveyancing in nature — disambiguates.
The key legal distinction between assart and waste recurs in forest law sources. Researchers must track this line carefully: waste involved cutting trees in ways permitting regrowth and was a lesser offense; assart was permanent destruction. The same distinction appears in Manwood's Treatise of the Laws of the Forest, a primary secondary source for forest law, though the work is itself historical.
American legal dictionaries carry this term only as a historical English law entry. It has no application in U.S. or modern Commonwealth law and should be treated accordingly — useful for historical research, inapplicable to current doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionary sources are in close agreement on substance, which is expected for a purely historical term with no contested modern meaning.
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) emphasizes the definitional distinction from waste, framing assart as the more destructive and therefore more serious offense. The formulation — "utterly destroying them, so that they can never afterward grow" — is repeated verbatim across editions, suggesting the drafters were drawing from a common source, likely Manwood or Cowell.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds useful genealogical depth, tracing the term through Norman French (assartir), Old French (essarter, to improve land by rooting up thickets), and Low Latin (exartare). The citation to Britton (Britt. 184b) and Manwood's Forest (Manw. For. 48a) points researchers to the primary English forest law sources. Notably, Rapalje & Lawrence also gestures toward the historical policy context — the forest laws as a system protecting royal game — though the entry breaks off before completing that analysis in the extracted text.
Webster's 1913 and earlier lexicographers (Spelman, Cowell, Ash) confirm the dual sense of the word: both the act and the resulting land. This dual usage is underrepresented in the legal dictionaries, which focus on the offense, and is worth noting for researchers reading historical land records.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit: any discussion of the procedural aspects of assart prosecutions, the licensing mechanism by which the Crown could authorize what would otherwise be an assart (important for understanding assart in land grant contexts), or the decline of forest law jurisdiction. For those dimensions, researchers must go beyond the dictionary sources to treatises and primary records.
Jurisdictional Note
Assart is exclusively a concept of historical English forest law. It has no equivalent in American law and does not appear in any active common law or statutory system. References to assart in modern legal writing are invariably historical or comparative.