Definition
An archaic term of English law meaning to banish or exile permanently — to deprive a person forever of their rights, standing, or presence within a jurisdiction. To "forbaner" was to shut out utterly, carrying the force of perpetual exclusion rather than temporary removal.
The term operated in the context of medieval English legal proceedings concerned with outlawry and banishment, where formal acts of the crown or parliament could strip a subject of legal protection and expel them from the realm.
Common Confusion
Forbaner should not be confused with the broader concept of outlawry, though they overlap. Outlawry placed a person outside the protection of the law — making them, in the medieval formulation, the king's enemy whom anyone might lawfully kill. Forbaner emphasizes permanent exclusion and deprivation of standing, but did not necessarily carry the same lethal permissiveness as full outlawry. Similarly, abjuration of the realm was a distinct medieval procedure by which a person, often a fugitive taking sanctuary, formally swore to leave England permanently under clerical or judicial supervision. Banishment as a general term is broader and crosses many periods and jurisdictions. Forbaner is the specific, archaic English statutory term for the act of that perpetual shutting-out.
Why It Matters in Research
Forbaner is effectively a dead term in modern legal practice and does not appear in contemporary statutes or judicial opinions. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in medieval English legal texts, parliamentary records, and early treatises. Its significance lies in what it illuminates about the conceptual architecture of medieval outlawry: the idea that the law could not merely punish but could annihilate a person's legal existence entirely.
Researchers working with fifteenth-century English sources should note that the statutes referenced in historical dictionaries — 9 Richard II, c. 2, and 6 Henry VI, c. 4 — govern the specific procedural contexts in which this form of permanent exclusion was invoked. These are English parliamentary statutes and should be sought in collections of early English statutes, such as the Statutes of the Realm. Cowel's Interpreter, also cited by Bouvier, is itself a seventeenth-century legal glossary and represents a secondary layer of interpretation rather than primary legal authority.
The practical trap for researchers is conflation: forbaner sounds like, and is conceptually adjacent to, terms like outlawry, banishment, and abjuration — but each had distinct procedural triggers and legal consequences under medieval English law. Using these terms interchangeably in historical research will produce inaccurate results.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines forbaner as "to deprive forever; to shut out," citing 9 Ric. II cap. 2, 6 Hen. VI cap. 4, and Cowel. This entry is notably spare even by Bouvier's standards, reflecting that by the nineteenth century the term was already a historical curiosity rather than a term of active legal art. Bouvier preserves it primarily for completeness and for the benefit of practitioners and scholars reading older English legal instruments.
The dual formulation — "to deprive forever" and "to shut out" — captures two related but distinct dimensions of the concept: deprivation of legal rights and physical exclusion from the realm. Whether both consequences always attached simultaneously, or whether specific statutory contexts produced one without the other, would require direct examination of the cited statutes.
No other major historical dictionaries in the standard American or English legal reference shelf address forbaner as a distinct entry, suggesting Bouvier drew on Cowel as his primary source and that the term's circulation in legal reference literature was narrow even historically.