Definition
An archaic Latin form appearing in old English legal records, equivalent to "chase" or "chace" — a type of hunting ground intermediate between a royal forest and a private park. A chasea was an open, unenclosed tract of land over which the right to hunt was held, typically by a lord or nobleman under royal grant. Unlike a forest, it was not subject to forest law and its special courts; unlike a park, it was not enclosed and did not require a physical boundary. The term appears in medieval and early modern legal documents as a Latinized variant of the vernacular English "chase."
Common Confusion
CHASEA, CHACE, CHACEA, and CHASE all refer to the same legal concept across different documentary traditions. Chasea and Chacea are Latin forms used in formal records and pleadings; Chace and Chase are the English equivalents. Researchers encountering any of these forms in historical documents should treat them as interchangeable for substantive purposes. The multiplicity of spellings is a product of medieval scribal practice and the fluid transition between Latin and English legal record-keeping, not a signal of distinct legal meanings.
Why It Matters in Research
This term matters almost exclusively to researchers working with medieval English legal records, land grants, and property documents. Several practical traps apply:
Spelling variation is the primary obstacle. Historical records — royal charters, plea rolls, inquisitions post mortem, manorial surveys — may render this concept as chasea, chacea, chace, chase, or further variants. A researcher searching a single spelling will miss cognate references. When indexing or searching digitized records, cast the net wide.
The term sits within a hierarchy of hunting rights that has significant legal consequence in the corpus. Forest, chase, free warren, and park were legally distinct categories, each carrying different rights, obligations, and jurisdictional implications. Misreading a grant of chasea as equivalent to a grant of forest rights — which carried crown prerogatives and forest law jurisdiction — would be a substantive error, not merely terminological imprecision.
Burrill's cross-reference structure (directing to Chace and Chacea) is itself a research signal: the substantive content for this cluster of terms is distributed across related headings. Researchers should follow all three entries in historical dictionaries rather than stopping at any one form.
The term does not survive into modern law in any active doctrinal sense. Its relevance is entirely historical — property history, manorial records, and the development of English land law and game law through the medieval and early modern periods.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats chasea as a bare Latin form, directing readers immediately to the English and alternate Latin variants (Chace, Chacea) without independent substantive discussion. This reflects the entry's function as a cross-reference node rather than a substantive definition — the dictionary's content on the underlying institution appears under the related headings.
Historical legal dictionaries generally agree that the chase occupied a middle position in the English hunting-rights hierarchy, but they vary in how precisely they distinguish it from related concepts. Burrill, in common with other sources of the period, does not attempt a systematic doctrinal analysis of these gradations; the definitions are largely descriptive and historical. Researchers requiring precise analysis of the legal boundaries between forest, chase, and warren rights will need to supplement dictionary sources with treatises on English real property law and the specialized literature on forest law.
Jurisdictional Note
Chasea is a term of exclusively English legal origin and has no cognate in Scots law, American law, or other common law traditions. Its relevance is confined to English legal history, particularly the period from the Norman Conquest through the early modern era when Latin remained standard in formal legal records.