Definition
In old English practice, to divide or bifurcate the process of essoigning — that is, the formal claiming of an excuse for non-appearance in court. Forcher refers to the act of "fourching," a procedural maneuver by which a defendant in a personal action could delay proceedings by alternating essoin claims between two or more defendants, each taking a turn at being excused, thereby serially postponing the day of reckoning. The term derives from the Anglo-Norman legal French and is treated in Burrill's as a variant entry pointing directly to its principal form, FOURCHER.
Why It Matters in Research
FORCHER is a minor variant spelling, not a standalone doctrine. Researchers encountering this term in medieval or early modern English legal records, plea rolls, or abridgments should treat it as an alternate form of FOURCHER and follow that entry for substantive analysis. The term surfaces primarily in connection with the Statute of Westminster I (1275), chapter 43, which regulated and curtailed the abuse of essoign procedure. Any research touching on essoin practice, delays in medieval common law pleading, or the procedural reforms of the Westminster statutes will encounter the forching device as a specific target of legislative correction.
The practical danger for corpus researchers is treating FORCHER as a distinct procedural term with independent doctrinal content. It does not have such content — its function in primary sources is descriptive, naming the act of dividing essoin appearances rather than any freestanding legal right or remedy.
Because essoign practice is largely extinct and the Anglo-Norman vocabulary surrounding it is unfamiliar to modern readers, researchers should be cautious about inferring meaning from context alone. Terms like essoign, voucher, imparlance, and fourch cluster together in records of this period and are easily confused.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole shelf-source entry, and it is minimal: a brief cross-reference identifying FORCHER as Law French for "to divide" in the essoign process, citing Statute of Westminster I, chapter 43, and directing the reader to FOURCHER. Burrill adds no independent analysis. No additional treatment appears in the other standard historical law dictionaries surveyed for this corpus. The thinness of coverage is itself informative — this is a term that even historical legal lexicographers treated as subordinate vocabulary, significant only as a key to understanding the forching abuse that Westminster I was designed to suppress. Researchers should not expect richer treatment in period abridgments unless examining the Westminster statutes directly.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs exclusively to the historical English common law and has no application in modern American, English, or Commonwealth practice. Essoign procedure as a whole was abolished long before American law was systematized.