Definition
A Latin legal phrase meaning literally "to forfeit one's skin." In historical English law, the term described the legal consequence imposed on a person condemned to corporal punishment by whipping. It was applied specifically in the context of servile punishment — anciently, the designated penalty for a servant who had committed an offense meriting physical chastisement. Two companion phrases appear alongside it in the historical sources: corium perdere, meaning "to lose one's skin," carrying the same sense of suffering the whipping penalty; and corium redimere, meaning "to redeem one's skin" — that is, to compound or buy off the punishment by paying a sum in lieu of being flogged.
The term is purely historical and descriptive. It does not denote a formal cause of action, a property right, or a procedural concept. It is a Latin gloss on a now-abolished category of penal consequence.
Common Confusion
Corium forisfacere is sometimes encountered in close proximity to other forisfacere compounds in historical legal texts. The root forisfacere — to forfeit, or to act outside what is permitted — appears across a wide range of medieval Latin legal phrases, many of which concern forfeiture of property or estate rather than forfeiture of bodily integrity. Researchers encountering forisfacere in a medieval or early modern source should not assume it refers to corporal punishment; the corium element is the operative indicator that bodily punishment, not property forfeiture, is the subject.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will almost never appear in a live legal dispute or modern statutory context. Its research relevance is entirely historical and is most likely to surface in one of three situations.
First, researchers working in Anglo-Saxon or early medieval English legal history, or in Latin legal manuscripts predating the common law's consolidation, may encounter the phrase in original sources or in scholarly commentary on servile status and the legal treatment of unfree persons. The term is a marker of a legal world in which the body of a servant or serf was subject to a distinct regime of punishment — one calibrated to status rather than offense alone.
Second, the phrase appears as a term of art in historical legal dictionaries and glossaries. Its presence in Black's (both editions) and in Rapalje & Lawrence reflects the nineteenth-century project of cataloguing the Latin inheritance of the common law, including terms long obsolete in practice. Researchers using those dictionaries as finding tools should recognize that corium forisfacere represents a stratum of legal vocabulary that was already archaic when those dictionaries were compiled.
Third, the companion phrases — corium perdere and corium redimere — are essential to understanding the full legal picture. Corium redimere is particularly significant: it documents the practice of commuting corporal punishment through payment, a mechanism that links the history of corporal punishment to the broader history of composition, fine, and redemption in early law. A researcher interested in the economics of medieval punishment or the origins of fine-based criminal justice will find corium redimere the more analytically productive of the three phrases.
No jurisdictional variation is meaningful here: the term belongs entirely to historical English law and has no American application.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence present essentially identical definitions, all tracing to Wharton's Law Lexicon as the cited authority. The agreement across all three sources is complete, which reflects that all three were drawing from the same English-language lexicographical tradition rather than from independent primary research.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the social and legal context that gives the term its meaning. The specification that this was "anciently the punishment of a servant" is significant but unexplained: it points to the distinction in early English law between free persons and unfree persons (villeins, serfs, and household servants), for whom corporal punishment was a standard legal consequence in ways it was not for freeholders. The dictionaries preserve the phrase as a curiosity without illuminating this underlying structure of personal status.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is notable for an editorial artifact: the definition of corium forisfacere runs directly into an unrelated entry for CORN without section break, reflecting the compressed format of that dictionary. Researchers using that source in digitized or microfilm form should be alert to this typographical conflation.