Definition
A Latin term appearing in old English legal records meaning to grub up or clear woodland and convert it to arable land or meadow — essentially, to remove trees and undergrowth by the roots in order to render land cultivable or fit for pasture. The term is rendered in Cowell as "to stock up," referring to the physical act of uprooting stumps and clearing ground. Extocare appears in medieval land records as a descriptive term for a specific type of land improvement, relevant to rights, obligations, and disputes concerning the use and tenure of wooded or waste land.
Common Confusion
Extocare should not be confused with related land-use concepts such as assarting (the act of converting forest land to arable, often requiring royal license under forest law) or purpresture (unlawful enclosure of common or royal land). Though extocare describes a similar physical act, the term is documentary and descriptive rather than a term of legal art carrying formal procedural or statutory weight. Researchers encountering extocare in records should look to the surrounding context to determine whether the clearing described was lawful improvement or an unauthorized act giving rise to liability.
Why It Matters in Research
Extocare is a term of medieval land administration, not a living legal term. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in manorial records, monastic cartularies, and early English legal surveys — sources of the type cited by Burrill, who references Monasticon Anglicanum (2 Mon. Angl. 71), the major collection of English monastic records compiled by Dugdale. Its appearance in a document signals a transaction or event involving woodland clearance, which in medieval England carried significant legal implications: clearing land within a royal forest without license was a serious offense under forest law, while lawful assarting could alter the tenure status and annual value of a holding.
The term will not appear in modern statutory or case law. Its research value lies entirely in historical property and land-tenure contexts. When found in transcribed or translated records, the spelling may vary — medieval Latin scribal conventions were inconsistent, and parallel terms or synonyms (such as essartare or assartare) may appear in related documents describing the same act.
Researchers working backward from modern land title questions into medieval origins, or those studying the history of forest law and common rights, will need to understand this term as part of a broader vocabulary of land conversion that includes assarting, purpresture, and enclosure.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Burrill's — are in close agreement on the definition, differing only in that Burrill adds the citation to 2 Monasticon Anglicanum 71, which anchors the term in a specific documentary tradition. All three attribute the gloss "to stock up" to Cowell, referring to John Cowell's Interpreter (1607), one of the principal early English law dictionaries and a standard reference for medieval and early modern legal Latin. The convergence of all sources on a single brief definition reflects the term's narrow, archaic, and essentially non-contested meaning: it describes a physical act with legal consequences, not a legal concept with its own doctrine.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on the forest-law implications of the act described, which limits their utility for the researcher who needs to understand why the term mattered in the records where it appears. The substantive legal context — royal forest jurisdiction, assart fees, manorial custom — must be drawn from other sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Extocare is specific to English legal history and has no recognized equivalent in civil law or American legal tradition. It is relevant only to research involving English medieval and early modern land records.