Definition
Drift of the forest is a historical English forest law procedure by which officers of the royal forest periodically drove all cattle found within the forest into an enclosed pound or pinfold for inspection. The purpose was threefold: to identify whose animals were grazing, to determine whether those owners held a valid right of common (commonage) entitling them to pasture animals there, and to assess whether the forest was being overstocked (surcharged) beyond what the land could sustain. Animals belonging to persons without a recognized right of common could be impounded and their owners subjected to fines or forfeiture. The drift was thus simultaneously a census, a title check, and an enforcement mechanism for the forest's grazing economy.
The term "drift" here carries its older pastoral meaning — the act of driving livestock — combined with the jurisdictional frame of the royal forest, a legally defined territory subject to the forest law of medieval and early modern England.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of driving or herding cattle in a forest to a particular place in order to determine who they belong to and whether the owners have a right to common or pasture them in the forest, and whether any fines should be paid by those without such a right.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Drift" in its pastoral sense meant a drove or herd of cattle, or the act of driving them; also a driftway, a road or lane along which cattle were driven.
The legal meaning absorbs the ordinary pastoral sense entirely but adds a formal jurisdictional dimension that the common definition cannot supply. A drift in ordinary speech was simply the movement of livestock; a drift of the forest was a supervised, official proceeding conducted under the authority of the forest law, with legal consequences for both the animals found and their owners. The distinction is between an informal act and a constituted legal process.
Why It Matters in Research
Drift of the forest is a term researchers encounter almost exclusively in sources dealing with medieval and early modern English forest law, and almost never in American legal materials. Its practical research value lies in three directions.
First, corpus navigation: The term appears as part of a cluster of forest law vocabulary — agistment, regard, purlieu, common of mast, estovers, and the various forest courts (swainmote, attachment court, justice seat) — that a researcher working in English legal history must map together. Encountering "drift" in isolation, without that context, risks misreading a source entirely.
Second, the Latin equivalent matters. Burrill cites the Latin agitatio animalium in foresta, which is the form this procedure takes in original Latin sources, plea rolls, forest eyre records, and administrative documents. Researchers working in primary sources will need both the Latin and English forms to locate relevant material.
Third, the connection to rights of common is the substantive legal thread. The drift was the enforcement mechanism for determining who held a right to pasture in the forest. Understanding the drift requires understanding the structure of common rights — common of pasture, levancy and couchancy, and the concept of surcharge — because the drift was meaningless without those underlying entitlements. Researchers interested in the history of common land rights, enclosure, or the transition from forest law to modern land management will find the drift a procedural window into those larger topics.
No American jurisdiction recognized drift of the forest as a legal concept. The procedure has no modern domestic analog. It belongs entirely to the corpus of English legal antiquities and comparative legal history.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry's essential content, citing Manwood's treatise on forest law (part 2, chapter 15) and Coke's Institutes (4 Inst. 309) as the primary authorities. Manwood's work — Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest (1598, expanded 1615) — is the principal historical source on English forest law, and Coke's treatment in the Fourth Institutes addresses the forest courts and their procedures. Both are real and well-known texts in English legal history.
Burrill's Latin gloss (agitatio animalium in foresta) is accurate and useful; it confirms the term's roots in administrative Latin rather than common law pleading. The Wiktionary definition tracks Burrill closely and adds no divergent content. No significant disagreement between sources exists here because the term's meaning was fixed, technical, and historical even by the time Burrill was writing. There is no recorded evolution of the term across jurisdictions; it simply passed out of use as forest law itself became obsolete following the disafforestation and enclosure movements of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
What historical dictionaries do not supply — and what a researcher needs — is the procedural and institutional context: who conducted the drift (regarders, agisters, and other forest officers), how frequently (typically associated with the swainmote court's schedule), and what the consequences of surcharge or unlawful commonage were. For that, Manwood and the forest eyre records themselves are the necessary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Drift of the forest is a concept of English forest law with no reception in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers encountering the term in any American legal source should treat it as either a direct quotation from an English authority or a historical curiosity with no operative legal significance in that jurisdiction.