Definition
Bona forisfacta (Latin: "forfeited goods") is a historical legal term referring to personal property that has been forfeited to the Crown or state as a consequence of some offense, legal judgment, or breach of a condition. The term encompasses goods and chattels that pass out of private ownership by operation of law — not through sale or voluntary transfer, but through the legal penalty of forfeiture. In English legal practice, the concept was closely tied to attainder, conviction of felony, outlawry, and other conditions that stripped a person of property rights. The forfeited goods would typically vest in the Crown, or in a lord having franchise rights to receive forfeited property within a given jurisdiction.
Common Confusion
Bona forisfacta is occasionally conflated with escheat, but the two are distinct. Escheat occurs when property reverts to the Crown or state due to the failure of heirs or the legal incapacity to hold property — it is a default inheritance, not a penalty. Bona forisfacta, by contrast, is punitive in origin: the goods are forfeited because of an act or legal condition attached to the owner, not because no successor exists. The distinction matters in historical research because the two mechanisms triggered different legal proceedings, involved different Crown officers, and appear in different classes of historical records.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources and in treatises on English common law written before the nineteenth century. Researchers encountering bona forisfacta in historical documents should be alert to several navigational considerations.
First, the term belongs to a family of Latin property and penalty terms — including bona vacantia, bona peritura, and forisfactura — that appear frequently in Year Books, plea rolls, and early English treatises. Confusing these related terms will misdirect research. Bona forisfacta is specifically punitive and tied to a specific legal event triggering the forfeiture; bona vacantia refers to ownerless goods that fall to the Crown in the absence of any claimant, without a punitive rationale.
Second, the practical scope of bona forisfacta in English law shifted considerably over centuries. Under early common law, felony conviction automatically worked a forfeiture of the felon's personal estate as bona forisfacta. Parliamentary reform in England progressively curtailed this consequence, and the Forfeiture Act 1870 substantially dismantled automatic forfeiture on conviction. Researchers using this term in sources spanning different centuries must account for this evolution.
Third, in American law, the direct application of bona forisfacta as a doctrinal category was largely abandoned at the founding. Most American jurisdictions rejected automatic forfeiture of a convicted person's goods, and the term does not appear with any regularity in American case law or statutes. When it surfaces in American legal writing, it is almost always in a historical or comparative English law context.
Fourth, franchise rights to receive bona forisfacta — held by lords rather than the Crown directly — are documented in charter and patent sources. Researchers examining medieval franchise law, palatinate jurisdictions, or the legal powers of particular manors should be attentive to whether such franchise rights are at issue.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionary record for bona forisfacta is thin but consistent. Both Rapalje & Lawrence and Burrill's Law Dictionary define the term simply as "forfeited goods," with Burrill placing it explicitly in the English law context and citing Hale's Analysis of the Law as his authority. Sir Matthew Hale's Analysis, a structural overview of the common law, references forfeiture mechanisms as part of the larger treatment of how property passes by operation of law rather than by act of parties. Burrill's citation is a genuine pointer to where the concept sits in the common law architecture — within the law of property transfer by legal compulsion rather than voluntary conveyance.
Neither dictionary elaborates on the procedural machinery by which forfeiture was effectuated, the role of the escheat or forfeiture inquest, or the franchise dimension. Historical sources that go further include Blackstone's Commentaries (Book II, chapters on property, and Book IV on criminal consequences) and Coke's Institutes, where forfeiture of goods on felony conviction is addressed as part of the punishment framework. Hale's Pleas of the Crown is also a productive source for the mechanics of how bona forisfacta were identified and claimed following criminal judgment.
The historical dictionaries do not address the American departure from this doctrine, which is consistent with their English-law orientation but should not mislead researchers into assuming continuity across Atlantic jurisdictions.
Jurisdictional Note
Bona forisfacta is a term of English common law and has no living operational role in either English or American law. England abolished automatic forfeiture of a convicted person's personal estate by statute in the nineteenth century; modern asset forfeiture in both English and American law operates under distinct statutory frameworks with different names, procedures, and constitutional constraints. American researchers should treat the term as purely historical.