Definition
In old English law, land that has been converted from woodland into arable tillage by the uprooting of trees and removal of underwood. The term denotes both the act of clearing and the resulting cleared land itself. Essartum is the Latinized form of the term more commonly encountered as assart or essart in English legal texts.
Common Confusion
Essartum and assartum are variants of the same underlying concept and are used interchangeably in the sources. Burrill treats essartum as a direct synonym and cross-reference to assartum. Researchers should not treat them as distinct legal categories. Additionally, essartum describes cleared land — it should not be confused with purpresture (encroachment on the forest by enclosure or building) or waste (destruction of land in a different sense under common law tenure), both of which are related but legally distinct forest law offenses.
Why It Matters in Research
Essartum is primarily a term of medieval English forest law, appearing in records of the royal forests and in proceedings before the forest courts. Researchers working with early English land records, forest eyre rolls, or manorial documents may encounter the term in its Latin form. The critical navigational point is that Burrill directs readers to assartum as the primary entry, and most substantive legal treatment of the concept appears there. A researcher who stops at essartum without following the cross-reference to assartum will miss the bulk of relevant doctrine, including the offense of unauthorized assarting — which was a serious infraction against the forest law of the Crown, carrying penalties because it destroyed deer habitat and reduced the extent of the royal forest.
The term surfaces most frequently in documents from the Norman and early Plantagenet periods, when royal forest law was at its most expansive and rigorously enforced. Charters, forest perambulations, and eyre records from the thirteenth century onward are the most likely sources to contain essartum or its variants. Researchers should also be alert to spelling variants: essarta, essartum, essart, and assart appear interchangeably across manuscripts, reflecting the word's passage through Norman French into Law Latin.
Because the concept involves a transformation of land use, essartum is also relevant to questions of tenure, rent, and agricultural history. Cleared land often carried distinct obligations — assart rents — that appear in manorial accounts and Exchequer records. These obligations can persist in title chains well past the medieval period, occasionally surfacing in early American colonial land grants derived from English crown grants.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are entirely consistent on the core definition: woodland converted to tillage by uprooting trees and clearing underwood. There is no meaningful divergence among them on substance.
Burrill adds the most technically useful information, citing the Carta de Foresta (Charter of the Forest), 9 Henry III, c. 4, and directing the reader to assartum as the proper full entry. This is the only source among the four that situates essartum within a specific legal instrument and acknowledges that the term functions primarily as a variant spelling. The Carta de Foresta (1217) is a genuine and significant document — it qualified and partially rolled back the forest law expansions of earlier reigns — and the reference anchors essartum squarely in the forest law tradition.
Rapalje & Lawrence reproduce the standard definition without elaboration. The citations that appear immediately after the essartum entry in that source belong to the following entry (in esse) and should not be read as authority for essartum itself — a potential trap for researchers scanning the text.
Black's in both editions offers the bare definition with no additional doctrinal context, consistent with its treatment of other archaic law Latin terms that function chiefly as vocabulary aids for reading old records.
None of the historical dictionaries address the procedural or penal dimensions of unlawful assarting, which were substantial under forest law. For that material, researchers must consult dedicated treatments of English forest law rather than general legal dictionaries.