Definition
An archaic Latin term denoting the inhabitants of a particular coastal locality in early English legal and geographic usage. Based on the source record, the term refers to the people of a place identified in connection with the strait between England (specifically Cornwall or the southwestern coast) and the Isle of Wight. The entry is fragmentary and appears in Burrill in a corrupted or condensed form, likely referencing a Roman or post-Roman place name — possibly related to *Fretum Gallicum* or a similar geographic designation — and its associated population. The term has no operative legal meaning in modern law and appears solely as a historical or antiquarian entry.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is of very limited practical utility in active legal research but carries specific significance for historians of early English law, Roman Britain, and medieval geographic nomenclature. Researchers consulting Burrill should be aware that the entry as it appears is textually corrupt — "Foy or FoGESORIACUM" is almost certainly a typographic degradation of *Gesoriacum* (the Roman name for Boulogne-sur-Mer) or a related coastal designation, and "Engwey in Cornwall" may itself be a printing artifact. The Burrill entry cannot be taken at face value without cross-referencing against cleaner manuscript or earlier printed sources.
For researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus, this entry illustrates a broader hazard: early law dictionaries, including Burrill, incorporated geographic and quasi-ethnographic terms from Roman legal texts, medieval chronicles, and Domesday-era records without always preserving the source accurately. Transcription errors, archaic typefaces, and editorial condensation all compound over successive editions. A term like FAWENSES, encountered in a legal document or index, should be treated as a placeholder requiring independent verification against primary geographic and historical sources rather than a settled legal definition.
There is no modern jurisdictional or doctrinal context in which this term would appear. Its research value is archaeological: it signals the type of source being consulted and the era of legal writing in question.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind corpus for this entry, and the entry itself is visibly degraded. The phrase "Inhabitants of Foy or FoGESORIACUM" strongly suggests the original referred to *Gesoriacum* — the Roman port on the Gallic coast opposite Britain — and its inhabitants in some classical or post-classical legal context. The connection to "the strait between England and the Isle of Wight" is geographically inconsistent with Gesoriacum (which sits across the English Channel further northeast), suggesting either that the original entry described a different, genuinely local coastal population, or that multiple source passages were conflated in transcription.
No other major historical law dictionary in the standard reference shelf — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin, not Black's early editions — appears to carry this term, which further suggests it entered Burrill from a narrow antiquarian or ecclesiastical source rather than from common legal usage. The term should be treated as an isolated artifact of Burrill's unusually broad geographic scope rather than evidence of a recognized legal category.