Definition
A fordanno is, in old European law, the first assailant — the party who initiated an assault or hostile act against another. The term identifies the aggressor by position in sequence: the one who struck or moved against another before any responsive force was employed. It carries no extended doctrinal framework; it is a descriptive label used in historical legal proceedings to distinguish the initiating actor from a respondent or counterattacker.
Common Confusion
The second Black's Law Dictionary entry in the source material describes a party who enters real property peaceably and then expels the occupant by force — a figure associated with forcible detainer doctrine. This has no connection to fordanno. The confusion is an artifact of source extraction, not a historical conflation of legal concepts. Do not treat the forcible detainer language as part of this entry.
Why It Matters in Research
Fordanno is an archaic term of historical significance primarily in the context of early European customary law and its treatment of assault, self-defense, and provocation. Researchers encountering this term should treat it as a forensic or procedural marker rather than a substantive offense category. Its primary function in historical sources was allocative: identifying who bore initial responsibility in a violent encounter, which affected culpability, wergild calculations, and defenses available to the responding party.
The term will not appear in modern case law or statutory codes. Researchers working in Anglo-Saxon legal history, Norman customary law, or comparative early European legal systems are the most likely audience. Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum, cited across all source dictionaries, is the authoritative reference and the appropriate primary source for further investigation. Researchers should go directly to Spelman rather than rely on secondary restatements, as the dictionary entries here are thin paraphrases of a richer glossarial tradition.
Note the discrepancy in the second Black's Law Dictionary entry included in the source material: the text provided does not define fordanno at all, but instead defines a forcible detainer concept from the California Code of Civil Procedure. This appears to be a source extraction error. Researchers using Law Mind corpus tools should be alert to adjacency errors of this kind in historical dictionary scans, where definitions bleed across entries due to formatting irregularities in the original printed volumes.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core meaning: the first assailant. Burrill's adds the most texture, offering a Germanic and Saxon derivation (fore/bor meaning "before," and dannen meaning "to assault") that clarifies the term's construction and its conceptual function — priority in aggression, not the nature of the act itself. Bouvier's is the most spare, reducing the entry to three words. Black's first edition tracks Spelman directly. None of the sources provide procedural context for how the designation was applied, what legal consequences followed from being identified as fordanno, or how disputes over the designation were resolved. Researchers should not assume that these dictionary entries exhaust the term's historical usage; they reflect secondary glossarial tradition rather than primary legal records.