Definition
To clear land of trees and underwood; specifically, to thin a wood by cutting trees at intervals rather than by wholesale felling. The term describes the act of woodland clearance or selective thinning performed on land, typically in the context of land use, tenure, and the rights associated with forest or waste lands under medieval and early modern English law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not recorded in current general dictionaries. The term has no meaningful modern English circulation outside historical and legal contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded. Webster's 1913 does not carry this term, reflecting its status as a specialized legal and historical word of Norman French origin absorbed into English common law vocabulary.
Editorial note: Because the term carries no competing common meaning, the legal and ordinary senses present no gap to resolve. The term is pure legal and historical vocabulary, now largely obsolete in both contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering essarter in historical documents should understand two practical points. First, the term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern sources — land grants, forest court records, manorial surveys, and treatises on English forestry law. It is unlikely to appear in any American legal authority and has no live significance in modern common law jurisdictions. Second, there is a meaningful distinction embedded in the definition that sources tend to understate: essarter, properly used, refers to selective thinning at intervals, not to wholesale clearance. Wholesale clearing of woodland was a distinct act with distinct legal consequences, particularly under forest law where the Crown regulated what could be done with forested lands. A researcher parsing a historical document must determine whether the act described was selective thinning (essarter) or total assarting (the conversion of forest to arable), since the two carried different legal implications regarding tenure, Crown rights, and potential penalties under forest law.
The related noun form, essart or assart, is the more frequently encountered term in English legal records and secondary literature. Researchers searching Law Mind's corpus for land-clearing concepts in forest law should run searches on both the verb form (essarter) and the noun forms (essart, assart) to capture the full range of relevant materials. Burrill cross-references Spelman's Glossarium, which remains the primary authority for this term and its cognates in the historical dictionary tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in near-complete agreement, reproducing essentially the same definition, each tracing to Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicon as authority. This convergence signals that none of the major English-language legal dictionaries attempted original analysis of the term — all three are transmitting Spelman's account rather than drawing on case law or statutory authority. This is worth noting for researchers: the definition reflects lexicographical inheritance, not judicial construction.
Burrill is marginally more precise in his citation, referencing "Spelman, voc. Essartum," pointing specifically to the noun entry in the Glossarium rather than the verb, which underscores that the noun form assartum/essartum was the more developed legal concept in the primary sources. None of the three dictionaries engages with the legal consequences of the act — they define what essarter means as an activity without situating it within the framework of forest law obligations, Crown prerogative, or manorial right. Researchers seeking that contextual analysis must go beyond these dictionary entries to historical treatises on English forest law.
Jurisdictional Note
Essarter is a term of English origin with no reception in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Its relevance is confined to English legal history, primarily the medieval and early modern periods when forest law and manorial tenure structured land use. It has no operative significance in any current jurisdiction.