Definition
A feudal tribute or duty payable to the king's foresters. Forestagium was a charge imposed on persons who used or had access to royal forests, paid over to the officials responsible for administering and protecting those forests. It belonged to the broader system of forest law obligations by which the Crown extracted revenue from the use of its forest lands and game preserves.
Why It Matters in Research
Forestagium is a term of narrow historical scope — it appears almost exclusively in medieval English legal records and in the glossaries of legal writers working from those records. Researchers will encounter it in documents relating to royal forest administration, forest eyre proceedings, and charter materials from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Burrill's citation to a charter of 18 Edward I (1290) anchors the term firmly in that period and provides a concrete documentary trail for archival researchers.
The principal trap is conflation with other forest-related charges. Medieval forest law generated a dense vocabulary of overlapping obligations — pannage, cheminage, agistment, and purpresture fines, among others — and primary sources rarely define their terms. Forestagium should be distinguished from cheminage (a toll for passage through a forest) and from pannage (a payment for feeding pigs on forest mast). The shared root foresta can cause researchers to group these obligations imprecisely.
Because the term appears in Law Mind corpus sources only as a gloss citing Cowell's Interpreter, researchers tracing its meaning back further will need to consult Cowell directly. John Cowell's Interpreter (1607) is the authoritative seventeenth-century source the dictionary tradition uniformly cites, and Blount's Nomo-Lexicon (1670) repeats the same formulation. Neither source provides much elaboration beyond the bare definition, which reflects the term's narrow and specialized application even at the time of those compilations.
Jurisdictional reach is essentially limited to England. The concept did not migrate meaningfully into American law, and researchers working in colonial or early American materials are unlikely to encounter it in operative legal context.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four dictionary sources in the Law Mind corpus — Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Burrill's, and Bouvier's — are in complete agreement on the definition: a duty or tribute payable to the king's foresters. The consistency is notable but unsurprising, as all four are drawing from the same narrow chain of authority: Cowell, with Burrill adding Blount as a secondary confirming source.
Burrill's entry is the most substantive of the four. It supplies the Latin derivation from foresta, flags the term as "old English law," and cites the specific charter reference (18 Edw. I) that Blount had identified. This makes Burrill the most useful starting point for a researcher who needs to follow the documentary trail rather than stop at the definition.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the administrative machinery behind the charge — how it was assessed, collected, or enforced, or how it related to the forest eyre system. For that context, researchers must look beyond the dictionary tradition to secondary scholarship on medieval English forest law, such as works treating the organization of the royal forests under the Angevin and Plantagenet kings.
Jurisdictional Note
Forestagium was a feature of English royal forest law and has no direct counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. American legal dictionaries carry the term as a historical entry only, with no operative significance in any U.S. jurisdiction.