Definition
An obsolete term from old English law referring to the fawning season of deer — that is, the period during which does give birth to and nurse their fawns. The term appears in historical legal sources in the context of forest law and the regulation of deer in royal forests and private chases, where seasonal protections governed when deer could be hunted, disturbed, or taken.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term is not in current use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The word does not appear in general English dictionaries of the period.
The term is wholly a legal-forestry term of art drawn from Law French. It has no meaningful life outside the technical vocabulary of English forest law and carries no risk of confusion with ordinary English usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter foinesun only in materials touching on the medieval and early modern English law of forests — a body of law governing royal hunting rights, forest courts (including the Court of Swanimote and the Court of Justice in Eyre), and the protection of game animals (the venison) and their habitat (the vert). Within that body of law, seasonal terminology was legally operative: certain acts prohibited year-round became especially aggravated offenses during protected seasons, and foinesun defined one such season.
The practical research trap is terminological fragmentation. Forest law sources use a cluster of overlapping Latin, Law French, and Middle English terms for the same or adjacent concepts — feonatio, fawning, and foinesun may all appear in the same corpus referring to the same season, and a single-term search will miss the others. Burrill's cross-reference to Feonatio signals this directly.
Because foinesun appears almost exclusively in secondary glossaries (Spelman's Glossarium, Manwood's Treatise of the Forest Laws) and in records of forest eyres rather than in common law reports, researchers working in this area should expect the primary documentation to be administrative and archival rather than judicial. Glossary sources such as Spelman, cited by all three dictionary entries here, are themselves the primary evidence for the term's meaning rather than mere guides to it.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition — the fawning, or fawning time, of deer — and all three trace the term to a single authority: Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum. This unanimity reflects the term's narrow provenance: it is essentially a glossary entry that migrated into legal dictionaries rather than a term developed through extensive judicial use.
Burrill adds marginally more than the Black's entries by identifying the language of origin (Law French) and by cross-referencing the Latin cognate Feonatio — the more useful pointer for researchers working in Latin forest law records. The Black's entries are materially identical and add nothing beyond Burrill on the substance.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the operational legal significance of foinesun within forest law procedure — specifically, whether violations committed during the fawning season carried distinct penalties, how courts defined the season's temporal boundaries, or how the term interacted with the broader seasonal structure of forest law (which also recognized fence month and rutting season as specially protected periods). For these questions, the dictionaries are a starting point only, and researchers must go to Manwood and the forest eyre records directly.
Jurisdictional Note
Purely a term of English law. It has no reception in American law and does not appear in the legal systems of other common law jurisdictions. Its relevance is confined to English legal history, specifically the law of royal forests from roughly the Norman Conquest through the gradual obsolescence of the forest courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.