Definition
Asserte is a Law French term meaning cleared land — land from which trees, brush, or other growth have been removed to make it suitable for cultivation or other use. It is the anglicized rendering of the Latin and Law French term assart, denoting land reclaimed from forest or waste by clearing. The term appears in early English legal records in the context of forest law and land tenure, where the act of clearing land without royal license could constitute a trespass against the crown's forest rights.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering asserte in historical sources should treat it as a variant spelling of assart, a term with a specific and well-developed place in English forest law. The two forms appear interchangeably in Year Book records and early plea rolls; confusing asserte with a generic land description rather than recognizing it as a term of art in forest regulation can cause misreading of the legal issue at stake.
The single Year Book citation in Burrill — Yearb. M. 7 Edw. III. 3 — places this term squarely in the early fourteenth century, a period when royal forest jurisdiction was still actively contested and when assarting without license remained a cognizable offense in the forest courts (the eyre of the forest and the Court of Attachments). Researchers working in that period should be alert to the overlap between asserte/assart in common law land records and the parallel enforcement vocabulary of the forest eyre.
The Law Mind corpus does not appear to contain a dedicated forest law encyclopedia entry. Researchers pursuing the land-law dimensions of this term should cross-reference materials on seisin, waste, and tenure, as well as any corpus entries treating the interaction between royal prerogative and private land rights in the medieval and early modern periods.
Note the proximity in Burrill's entry to ASSES (enough; satisfaction), which immediately follows and is a wholly unrelated term. Researchers scanning Burrill in sequence should not conflate these entries; the juxtaposition is alphabetical coincidence only.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source here, and its treatment is minimal: a one-line gloss ("cleared land") with a single Year Book citation. The entry is more a note on vocabulary than a substantive legal definition, which is typical of Burrill's handling of obsolete Law French terms that had ceased to carry active doctrinal weight by the nineteenth century.
What Burrill does not supply — and what a researcher needs — is the regulatory context: assarting was prohibited under the Charter of the Forest (1217) and earlier forest legislation unless licensed by the crown. The act of clearing forest land altered the habitat in ways that diminished the king's deer and their cover, making it a matter of royal economic interest, not merely a land-use question. That background is absent from Burrill's compressed entry and must be drawn from forest law treatises and Year Book scholarship outside the Law Mind dictionary shelf.
Burrill's transliteration of the Law French phrase — "Le comen passa ove l'asserte" (the common passed with the cleared land) — suggests a context of conveyancing or pleading where the rights associated with the cleared land were at issue, likely whether common rights attached to or followed the asserted parcel. This is a narrow but technically important point in medieval land law.
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Jurisdictional Note
Asserte and its cognate assart are terms of English law with no direct American common law counterpart. United States land law developed independently of royal forest jurisdiction. Researchers working in American historical materials will not encounter this term in operative legal contexts.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The encyclopedia match offered — Attorney-Client Privilege in Discovery (civpro_69) — is not a meaningful cross-reference for this term. No relevant Law Mind Encyclopedia entry has been identified for asserte or for English forest law and land tenure. Researchers should consult the encyclopedia's coverage of property and tenure concepts for the nearest available context.
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