Definition
De parco fracto (Latin: "of a broken pound") is a writ or action at common law by which a plaintiff could recover damages caused by a pound-breach — that is, the wrongful breaking open of a pound and rescuing animals or goods that had been lawfully impounded. The writ is long obsolete and belongs entirely to the historical common law of England.
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Common Confusion
De parco fracto is the legal remedy; pound-breach is the underlying wrong. Researchers encountering either term should look up both. The two terms are cross-referenced in historical dictionaries but are distinct: pound-breach describes the act, while de parco fracto describes the writ brought to redress it. A second source of confusion is the writ de homine replegiando and related replevin actions, which also concern impounded property but operate on entirely different grounds — replevin recovers the property itself, while de parco fracto sought damages for the wrongful breaking of the pound.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational marker more than a living legal concept. Researchers encounter de parco fracto almost exclusively in two contexts: (1) historical surveys of common law writs, particularly those inventorying forms of action that had already become obsolete by the time Blackstone wrote; and (2) cross-reference chains within historical legal dictionaries, where it appears as a see-also entry under pound-breach, rescue, or impoundment.
The writ's obsolescence is old — Coke and Blackstone both treated it as a historical artifact, meaning any primary source use predates the seventeenth century. Researchers using Law Mind's historical corpus should not expect to find de parco fracto in American sources at all; it did not cross the Atlantic as an operative writ. Its appearance in American legal dictionaries (including both editions of Black's) reflects the encyclopedic ambition of those works to catalog the full common law heritage, not any practical American usage.
The phrase is also a useful signal: when a historical text cites de parco fracto, it is typically engaged in a broader survey of pound law, distress, or the law of impoundment — topics that do carry forward into American property and agricultural law under different names and procedures.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st Ed.) and Rapalje & Lawrence are in precise agreement, to the point of near-identical language: both define de parco fracto as a writ for damages caused by a pound-breach and both declare it long obsolete, citing Coke's Littleton (Co. Litt. 476 / 47b) and Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 146). The minor variation in the Coke citation (476 versus 47b) reflects a folio versus page-number referencing difference across editions, not a substantive discrepancy.
The second edition of Black's does not contain a usable entry for this term in the provided source material — the excerpt supplied is a fragment from an unrelated maxim concerning dower and indivisible property. Researchers should treat the 2nd Ed. as non-additive on this term.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any discussion of the procedural mechanics of the writ, its relationship to the broader forms-of-action system, or why it fell into disuse. For that context, Blackstone's Commentaries Book III and Coke's Littleton remain the primary sources, as both dictionary entries indicate.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Pound-Breach; Forms of Action (Common Law); Distress and Impoundment.
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