Definition
A writ of forfeiture of marriage. In feudal English law, this writ lay against a ward who married without the consent of the lord or guardian entitled to the wardship. When a ward in knight's service married without the lord's license, the lord was entitled to forfeit the marriage — that is, to claim compensation or a financial penalty. The writ de forisfactura maritagii was the procedural vehicle by which the lord enforced that forfeiture before a court. The writ is entirely obsolete, having no application in modern law.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow historical writ of feudal origin, relevant almost exclusively to researchers working in medieval or early modern English legal history, or studying the evolution of wardship, marriage, and the incidents of tenure under the common law. Researchers should be aware of several navigational points.
First, the writ belongs to the cluster of feudal tenures incidents — rights that attached to knight's service tenure — abolished in England by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660 (12 Car. II c. 24). Any primary source deploying this writ will almost certainly predate that statute. Post-1660 references are likely historical summaries, not living practice.
Second, the Registrum Originalium (Reg. Orig.) cited by all three source dictionaries is the standard reference point. The Registrum Originale was the official register of original writs issued from Chancery, and pages 163–164 of that work contain the form of this writ. Researchers accessing English Chancery records or formularies from the medieval period should look to the Registrum as the primary technical source on writ form and pleading requirements.
Third, this writ connects to a broader research thread: the lord's right of marriage (maritagium in the custodial sense) over wards in knight's service. The lord could sell or assign the marriage of a ward to a third party, and a ward who refused a suitable match — or married without license — could forfeit double the value of the marriage (duplex maritagii valor). The writ de forisfactura maritagii was the enforcement mechanism for the latter situation. Researchers studying Magna Carta chapter 6 (restricting disparagement in marriage) will find this writ implicated in debates about the limits of that protection.
Fourth, American researchers will find this term without practical domestic application. The feudal incidents of tenure, including wardship and marriage, were never fully transplanted to the American colonies in operative form, and the writ has no U.S. statutory or common law history.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Rapalje & Lawrence — are in complete agreement: all three define the term identically as "writ of forfeiture of marriage" and all three cite Reg. Orig. 163, 164 as their sole authority. This uniformity reflects the purely historical character of the term; there was no contested meaning to resolve, no American case law to absorb, and no evolution of definition to track. The dictionaries function here as translators of the Latin formula rather than as reporters of living legal doctrine.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any contextual explanation of the feudal system in which this writ operated: the doctrine of wardship, the lord's right of marriage, the financial value at stake, or the relationship to the duplex maritagii valor remedy. A researcher relying solely on these dictionary entries would understand the writ's name but not its function. Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and Littleton's Tenures, as synthesized in Coke on Littleton, provide the necessary substantive backdrop that the dictionaries omit.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ is exclusively English in origin and has no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or Irish law as a distinct procedural form. It is inoperative everywhere today.