Definition
In old English law, to wind or blow a horn. The term denotes the formal act of sounding a horn as a required legal signal, particularly in the context of forest law and the lawful taking of game or passage through royal forest. The blowing of the horn served as public notice — an audible declaration that the actor was proceeding openly and with lawful authority, distinguishing legitimate conduct from covert or furtive action.
The operative phrase preserved in the sources is: *Faciat cornari, ne videatur furtivé hoc facere* — "He shall cause a horn to be blown, that he may not seem to do this by stealth." This formula captures the legal function of the act precisely: the horn blast was not ceremonial but evidentiary, converting what might otherwise appear as poaching or trespass into a transparently lawful entry.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard entry for *cornare*. The English word "horn" retains its ordinary meaning as a wind instrument or animal appendage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry for *cornare*. The word is a Latin legal term of art with no direct English common-language counterpart.
The absence of any common-language parallel makes this a term of pure historical legal jargon. The section is omitted accordingly; researchers should approach *cornare* as a technical term of medieval forest law with no live ordinary-English meaning.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is an archaic term of narrow scope, confined almost entirely to medieval English forest law. Researchers will encounter it only in primary or secondary sources dealing with the administration of royal forests, forest courts, and the privileges and obligations of persons with rights of chase, warren, or free passage through designated woodland.
The critical research point is functional: *cornare* was part of a broader system of public-notice requirements designed to police forest offenses. The Charter of the Forest (*Carta de Foresta*, 1217, confirmed and reissued through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) and associated forest regulations established formal procedures distinguishing lawful hunting and transit from poaching. Sounding the horn was one such procedural marker. Failure to comply could expose the actor to suspicion of theft or unlawful taking regardless of underlying entitlement.
Researchers working in:
- **Forest eyre records** and forest court proceedings will encounter *cornare* as part of procedural narration;
- **Glossaries and commentaries** on Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest will reference the horn-blowing requirements in passing;
- **Spelman's Glossarium** (cited by Burrill) is the key secondary authority and should be consulted for contextual treatment of forest law terminology.
Do not expect to find *cornare* in post-medieval legal sources. The term belongs to a legal regime — the royal forest system — that had substantially eroded by the seventeenth century and was formally dismantled in large part by the Statute of Charles II's reign. Later dictionaries of English law typically omit it entirely, which means Burrill's citation to Spelman and the *Carta de Foresta* is among the more accessible modern reference points.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary treatment in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill's entry is brief but accurate: he identifies the term as Low Latin, traces it to *cornu* (horn), and quotes the operative phrase from the Charter of the Forest, Chapter 11. His citation to Spelman situates the term within the glossarial tradition of medieval Latin forest law vocabulary.
No substantive divergence exists among historical sources because the term's coverage is so narrow that only specialized glossaries address it. The risk for researchers is not conflicting authority but scarcity of authority — most general law dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries simply do not include *cornare*, reflecting its obsolescence well before the dictionary-compilation era.
What historical sources do not supply is procedural context: what courts enforced the horn-blowing requirement, what consequences followed from failure to *cornare*, and how consistently the requirement was applied across different forest jurisdictions. For those questions, researchers must move from the dictionaries to primary forest eyre records and the Charter of the Forest itself.
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Jurisdictional Note
Exclusively English in origin and application. The royal forest system was a peculiarly English legal institution, and *cornare* has no recognized counterpart in Scots law, civil law systems, or American law. No jurisdictional variation is relevant because the term did not migrate beyond its historical context.
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