Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning to counterfeit. Falsare denoted the act of fraudulent imitation or forgery — most commonly the counterfeiting of a seal. The related noun falsarius identified the person who committed the act: a counterfeiter. Falsare also functioned as the name of the legal action that arose from this wrong, giving it dual significance as both the description of the offense and the basis for a cause of action.
Common Confusion
Falsare is occasionally grouped loosely with terms like forgery, fraud, and falsum as though they were interchangeable in historical sources. They are not. Falsum was the broader Roman-law category encompassing various forms of fraudulent deception. Falsare was the specific operative verb — the act of counterfeiting — and its procedural footprint in old English law was distinct from the civil action for fraud generally. Researchers should also not confuse falsarius (the person) with falsare (the act or action), as historical sources sometimes use the noun form where the verb form would be more precise.
Why It Matters in Research
Falsare is a term you are unlikely to encounter outside of medieval English legal materials and the treatises that organized or commented on them. Its primary research significance is threefold.
First, the term appears in Bracton — the foundational 13th-century Latin treatise on English law — and sources that reference Bracton (including Burrill and both editions of Black's) consistently cite folio 276 of that work. Any researcher tracing the doctrine of seal-counterfeiting in medieval English law should treat Bracton as the primary source and the dictionary entries as secondary pointers toward it.
Second, Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 138) references falsare in the context of the civil action available for counterfeiting injuries. This is the bridge between the purely medieval usage and the later common-law organization of remedies. If you are researching the history of forgery as a civil wrong, the Blackstone citation in Black's first edition is a direct lead.
Third, researchers working in old English or Anglo-Latin court records may encounter the phrase quia falsavit sigillum ("because he counterfeited the seal") as a recital of the ground of action. Recognizing falsare and its inflected forms in pleading records is essential to identifying what kind of proceeding is being described.
The term has no living legal significance in modern practice and will not appear in contemporary statutes, regulations, or case law. Its domain is strictly historical and comparative.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition: falsare means to counterfeit, and falsarius means a counterfeiter. All sources that cite primary authority point to Bracton, folio 276 (with minor variation between 276b and 276d across editions, reflecting different foliation conventions in Bracton manuscripts and editions). The Burrill entry is the most complete, supplying both the Bracton citation and a secondary reference to Townshend's Pleadings. Rapalje & Lawrence adds a brief note distinguishing the term from false (distinguished from "untrue"), which is editorially useful but underdeveloped — it signals a distinction without explaining it.
Black's first edition is notable for capturing falsare's dual function as both the name of the offense and the name of the civil action, citing Blackstone directly. The second edition of Black's reproduces essentially the same entry with minor textual variation. Bouvier's entry is the sparest, offering only the act-definition and the Bracton cite without the Blackstone connection.
No source in the Law Mind corpus discusses the procedural mechanics of the falsare action in any depth. For that, researchers must go to Bracton and Blackstone directly.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forgery (Historical); Seal (Medieval English Law); Bracton and the Common Law Treatise Tradition