Definition
An archaic term from Saxon law denoting the stopping or obstruction of a way or road. The term describes the physical act or condition of blocking a path, thoroughfare, or passage. It appears principally in Domesday Book records and in the work of the antiquarian lexicographer Spelman, functioning as a technical descriptor within early English land and road law rather than as a term of active legal pleading or procedure.
Common Confusion
FARISTEL and FORESTALL share etymological roots and are closely connected in the early sources, but they are not interchangeable. FARISTEL is the Saxon antecedent term describing the obstruction itself. FORESTALL developed as an active legal concept — and later a commercial offense — involving the interception of goods before they reached market, or the obstruction of persons on a highway with intent to rob or impede. The commercial meaning of FORESTALL (buying up goods to raise prices) became prominent in medieval and early modern English law and has no counterpart in FARISTEL. A researcher finding FARISTEL in a primary source should not read into it any of the developed commercial or criminal content that later attached to FORESTALL.
Why It Matters in Research
FARISTEL is a terminal-end historical term: it does not survive into modern legal usage, and researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in three contexts — transcriptions of Domesday Book, glossaries of Saxon legal terms, and secondary commentaries on early English highway and road law. Its primary research value is as a gateway to understanding the conceptual lineage of FORESTALL and related offenses involving obstruction of public ways.
The critical navigational point is this: Burrill links FARISTEL directly to FORESTALL, and that connection is where the term earns its research utility. A researcher puzzling over early obstruction-of-highway language in pre-Conquest or early post-Conquest sources who encounters FARISTEL should immediately trace forward to FORESTALL, which carries a much richer doctrinal and commercial history into the common law period.
Be aware that historical dictionary entries for this term are sparse and frequently bundled with neighboring entries (Burrill's entry, for instance, runs directly into FARLEY/Farleu without a clean break). Cross-contamination of definitions in transcription is a real hazard with terms of this vintage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole substantive entry among the indexed sources. Burrill derives the term from the Saxon elements far (a way) and stal (a stall or stopping), and attributes the usage to Domesday with Spelman as the interpretive authority. No competing derivation or alternative definition appears in the surveyed sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any procedural context, penalty, or remedial framework. FARISTEL as recorded is a descriptive label for a condition or act, not a cause of action, not an indictable offense with defined elements. Researchers should not assume the term carried the same normative weight that later highway obstruction doctrines would carry under common law.
Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum is the primary underlying authority Burrill cites, and consulting Spelman directly will yield the fullest available treatment for scholarly purposes.