Definition
To expeditate or disable dogs. A term from old English forest law referring to the mutilation or maiming of dogs — specifically the removal of claws or pads from the forefeet — to prevent them from running down and killing deer or other game in royal forests. The practice was a regulatory requirement imposed on dogs kept by persons living within or near designated forest bounds, ensuring that common landowners could not use their animals to poach the king's game. The act of espealtare was equivalent in meaning to expeditation, and the two terms were used interchangeably in the historical forest law literature.
Common Confusion
ESPEALTARE and EXPEDITATE are functionally synonymous in historical usage and should be treated as interchangeable when encountered in old English forest records. Researchers may also encounter the variant term "lawing" (or "laming"), which described the same or a closely related mutilation of dogs under forest law. These terms all refer to the same underlying regulatory practice; the variation is largely one of linguistic register — Latin, Law Latin, and Middle English forms coexisting in the same body of forest administration records.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is unlikely to appear outside of medieval and early modern English forest law sources — plea rolls, forest eyre records, forest charters, and treatises on the law of the forest such as Manwood's Treatise of the Forest Laws. Researchers encountering espealtare in a primary source should treat it as a marker that the document concerns forest administration rather than ordinary common law, which affects how the source is classified and cross-referenced within the Law Mind corpus.
The term is purely historical. It has no modern legal application and no statutory survival in contemporary English or American law. Its relevance to American legal research is limited to comparative or historical work tracing the roots of wildlife regulation, public land management, or the concept of the sovereign's interest in game — themes that do connect to later American doctrines even if espealtare itself does not.
Burrill cross-references this entry to EXPEDITATE, which is the more fully developed term in historical legal dictionaries and where the substantive treatment of forest dog law will be found. Any research beginning with espealtare should proceed immediately to expeditate for fuller context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief and purely referential, defining the term by translation and directing the reader to Cowell and to the entry for EXPEDITATE. This is consistent with the treatment the term receives across historical legal dictionaries generally: it appears as a cross-reference placeholder rather than a standalone subject of analysis. Cowell's Interpreter, which Burrill cites, is the most likely point of origin for the definition in the English legal dictionary tradition.
No meaningful divergence exists across historical sources on this term because the sources uniformly treat it as a variant form rather than an independent concept. The risk for researchers is not conflicting authority but absence of authority — espealtare is thin in the dictionary record, and the fuller legal and historical treatment is housed under expeditate and related forest law terms.
Jurisdictional Note
Espealtare is a term of English forest law with no recognized equivalent or survival in American, Scottish, or continental legal systems. It is relevant only to English legal history research.