Definition
Chaceable (also spelled chaseable) is a Law French term meaning capable of being chased or hunted. It describes animals or game that may lawfully be pursued in the hunt, and by extension characterizes the nature of a chace or chase — the right to hunt over a defined territory. The term appears in medieval English legal sources and is primarily encountered in the context of forest law and the law of chace, where the distinction between huntable and non-huntable animals, and between lands subject to hunting rights and those not, carried real legal consequence.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recorded as a standard modern English word.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded. The root word "chase" appears as both a verb (to pursue) and a noun (a hunt or the land over which hunting is conducted), but "chaceable" as a standalone form is absent from general dictionaries of the period.
The gap here is one of specialized survival: the ordinary sense of "to chase" is familiar enough, but chaceable is a term of art that belongs entirely to medieval English property and forest law. It did not migrate into general usage, and a researcher encountering it in historical sources will not find help from any common dictionary.
Common Confusion
Chaceable should not be confused with chace or chase (the noun), which denotes the hunting right itself or the land subject to it. Chaceable is an adjective modifying either the land (as ground over which hunting may be exercised) or the animal (as game subject to pursuit). Burrill directs the reader from chaceable to chace, reinforcing that the term is a modifier within that broader legal framework and not a standalone doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English land records, forest law, or early common law property sources will encounter chaceable in Year Book materials and related pleadings. The primary navigational point: the term is essentially inert in post-medieval legal literature. It does not appear in equity, statutory, or American legal sources in any meaningful way. If you find it, you are almost certainly reading a source from or directly derived from the medieval English forest law tradition.
The Year Book citation in Burrill (P. 10 Edw. III. 28) anchors the term firmly in the fourteenth century. Researchers using Law Mind corpus materials should treat chaceable as a signal word — its presence identifies a document as engaging with the law of chace, forest rights, or game law, and should prompt cross-referencing with related entries on chace, free warren, and profit à prendre.
One research trap: the variant spelling "chaseable" could theoretically appear in later transcriptions or translations of medieval sources, modernizing the Law French orthography. Neither form appears in standard modern legal dictionaries beyond the historical entries reproduced here, so absence from a secondary index does not mean the underlying right is absent from the primary source.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries converge completely on substance: chaceable means "that may be chased or hunted," drawn from Law French. Black's (both editions) and Burrill's offer identical core definitions, with no divergence or evolution across the entries. Burrill adds the Year Book citation — the only primary source anchor among the three — and the cross-reference to chace, which is the more substantive entry in his dictionary. Black's second edition is slightly fragmentary in presentation but adds nothing new.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: they make no attempt to distinguish whether chaceable modifies land, animals, or both. Context in the Year Books suggests it could serve either function, and a researcher should not assume the term is limited to one application on the basis of these brief definitions alone.
Jurisdictional Note
Chaceable is exclusively an English legal term with no American reception. U.S. law never adopted the forest law framework within which the term operated. It is irrelevant to American jurisdictions except as a historical reference point in scholarly work on the English common law antecedents of property and game law.