Definition
A term from old English law denoting the aggressor who was killed in combat. The forbatudus was the party who initiated the fight and was subsequently slain by the person he attacked. The classification mattered legally because the status of the deceased as aggressor bore directly on whether the survivor could claim self-defense or justification, and on the criminal or civil consequences that followed the killing.
Why It Matters in Research
Forbatudus is a term a researcher is far more likely to encounter in a historical source than to search for deliberately. It appears in medieval and early common law materials concerning trial by combat, homicide justification, and the legal treatment of self-defense before modern doctrine took shape. A researcher working in pre-modern English criminal law, particularly materials touching on approvers, appeals of felony, or wager of battle, may encounter the term without context.
The practical research trap is that forbatudus functions as a passive legal label — it describes the dead aggressor from the survivor's perspective — and sources do not always make that directionality explicit. Confusing the forbatudus with the victor or with an innocent party inverts the legal significance entirely.
The term also surfaces in the broader cluster of Latin law terms associated with medieval combat procedure. Researchers using Black's or Bouvier's as a finding tool should treat the Jacob citation (referring to Giles Jacob's Law Dictionary, a widely circulated early English law dictionary) as the likely original source and trace backward from there for primary context. The term does not appear to have survived into modern legal usage in any jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's — agree exactly on substance: the forbatudus is the aggressor slain in combat, with all three citing Jacob as authority. There is no divergence in meaning across the sources, and no elaboration beyond the core definition. The uniformity suggests each source drew directly or indirectly from Jacob's Law Dictionary without independent development of the concept.
What the historical sources do not provide is procedural context: under what circumstances the classification was formally determined, whether it required a judicial finding, or what specific legal consequences flowed from the designation. Researchers needing that context must look beyond the dictionary sources to primary materials on trial by combat and the common law of homicide, such as Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae or Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law.
The absence of any modern edition of Black's retaining this term reflects its complete obsolescence as operative law. It survives only as a historical artifact.