Definition
In old English law, a strip or parcel of land lying before, in front of, or crosswise to another piece of land. The term appears in two related but distinct senses in the historical sources:
1. A foreland or headland — land lying at the front or head of a larger tract, analogous to what surveyors and agricultural writers called a headland (terra capitalis).
2. A transverse strip — a piece of land lying crosswise to an adjacent parcel, its side opposing the end, front, or head of the neighboring piece (terra transversalis). This sense describes the awkward remnant strips that arose from the medieval open-field system, where a strip running perpendicular to the main furlong blocks served as a turning space or boundary marker.
The term is archaic and appears almost exclusively in medieval conveyancing records, manor surveys, and glossarial sources. It has no operative significance in modern land law.
Common Confusion
FORERA and HEADLAND overlap substantially in the historical sources, and Burrill's own entry cross-references the two. The distinction, where one exists, is one of orientation: a headland (forera in the first sense) runs along the top or bottom of a cultivated strip and served as a turning place for the plow, while a forera in the second sense runs transversely and abuts the side of adjacent strips. In practice, copyists and glossators used the terms interchangeably, and researchers should not assume a consistent technical distinction across documents.
FORERA should not be confused with FORELAND in its coastal or navigational sense (a promontory or cape extending into water). The land-measurement meaning is entirely distinct.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval English land records — including extents, inquisitions post mortem, manor court rolls, and early conveyances — will encounter forera and its variants in property descriptions. Two practical points bear attention:
First, spelling instability is significant. Latin and Anglo-Norman scribal practice produced multiple forms. Researchers should search variant spellings and not rely on a single normalized form when working through manuscript or calendar sources.
Second, the transverse-strip meaning is specific to open-field agriculture. When a forera appears in a survey of arable land organized in furlongs and strips, it almost certainly describes a boundary or turning strip rather than a freestanding parcel with independent tenure. Treating it as a separate holding of equivalent status to the adjacent strips will misread the agrarian geography of the document.
The entry in Burrill cross-references FORESAID, a Scots law term meaning "aforesaid." These are entirely unrelated; the proximity in Burrill's text is alphabetical coincidence, not conceptual connection.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill draws directly on Cowell and Spelman for both senses of the term, and his entry is essentially a condensed synthesis of those two earlier glossarial authorities. Cowell's Interpreter and Spelman's Glossarium are the primary sources for forera in English legal lexicography; neither offers documentary illustration beyond the definitional gloss. Burrill adds no independent analysis.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is the practical agrarian context. The significance of forera as a turning strip or boundary remnant in the open-field system is better understood through agricultural history than through legal lexicography. Researchers should supplement dictionary sources with scholarship on medieval field systems to interpret forera correctly in manorial documents.
Jurisdictional Note
Forera is specific to English medieval land law and its documentary record. It has no counterpart in Scots law (where FORESAID is the lexically adjacent but functionally unrelated term), and it does not appear in the civil law tradition.