Definition
A forestaller is a person who commits the offense of forestalling — a category of conduct in old English law encompassing several distinct but related forms of obstruction or interception. The term carries three recognized meanings in legal sources:
1. Market forestaller: One who intercepts goods before they reach a public market, typically by purchasing them in advance or en route, with the intent to resell at inflated prices. This was the most commercially significant meaning and the one that persisted longest in legal discourse.
2. Highway obstructor: One who blocks, hinders, or beset a road or way — including a tenant who positions himself to prevent a landlord or lessor from entering or passing to property.
3. Deer interceptor: In forest law specifically, one who stations himself between a deer and the forest in order to prevent the animal from returning to the royal forest — a form of poaching offense under forest court jurisdiction.
The term could also denote the offense itself (forestalling), not merely the offender, and historical sources use it in both senses interchangeably.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who preemptively purchases goods to drive up market prices for resale; also, an agent noun for any person or device that forestalls (prevents or intercepts) something.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "One who forestalls; esp., one who forestalls the market." The example given is Locke, reflecting the commercial market sense.
The common language captures the market-manipulation meaning well, but elides the two distinctly legal senses — highway obstruction and forest law interception — that appear throughout historical legal dictionaries. Researchers encountering the term in forest court records or medieval land dispute materials may not find the commercial definition helpful at all.
Common Confusion
Forestaller is closely tied to two companion offenses — engrossing and regrating — that together formed a triad of market regulation crimes in English common law. All three targeted manipulation of trade, but they were technically distinct: forestalling meant intercepting goods before the market; engrossing meant buying up large quantities to corner the supply; regrating meant buying at market and reselling at a profit in the same or nearby market. Sources, including Blackstone, treat these together, and researchers should not assume that a source using one term covers the full triad.
Additionally, the term forestalling (the offense) and forestaller (the offender) appear interchangeably in Bouvier and Burrill, which can create ambiguity in older source transcriptions.
Why It Matters in Research
This term flags a structural challenge common in historical legal research: a single word that migrated across distinct doctrinal domains without disambiguation. A researcher searching for "forestaller" in the Law Mind corpus should anticipate at least three clusters of material — market regulation, highway and land obstruction, and forest/game law — that may not be indexed together.
The market-regulation sense is the most analytically developed. Blackstone's Commentaries address forestalling in the context of commercial offenses against public trade, and Bacon's Abridgement (cited by Rapalje & Lawrence under "Forestalling") contains extended treatment. This doctrinal line runs through municipal market regulation into early modern commercial law and has some conceptual continuity with later competition and anti-monopoly thought, though direct statutory lineage is thin.
The forest law sense is effectively dead as a living legal category and appears almost exclusively in historical materials — forest court records, treatises on royal forests, and Crompton's Jurisdiction. Burrill's citation to Crompton (Jurisd. 153) is a useful pointer for researchers working in that vein.
The highway-obstruction sense appears in the property and landlord-tenant context. Burrill and Bouvier both note the variant of a tenant besetting a way to prevent a lessor from entering premises — a procedural posture with some relevance to historical ejectment and trespass research.
Researchers should also note that forestalling as a market offense was formally abolished in England by statute in the nineteenth century (along with engrossing and regrating), meaning the offense has no direct modern common law vitality. Sources post-dating abolition that mention forestalling are almost always either historical commentary or discussing analogous modern regulatory concerns.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are broadly consistent but emphasize different aspects. Black's leads with the obstructive and forest-law senses before noting the market offender meaning, which reflects the older strata of the word's use. Burrill provides the most structured breakdown, distinguishing highway obstruction, tenancy besetting, and the deer-interception scenario, with the most precise cross-references (Blackstone's Commentaries at 3 Bl. Com. 170; Crompton's Jurisdiction). Bouvier largely tracks Blackstone and Cowel (John Cowell's Interpreter), treating the offense and the offender as nearly synonymous. Rapalje & Lawrence are the most economical, essentially defining the forestaller by reference to the offense of forestalling and pointing to Bacon's Abridgement for fuller treatment — useful as a navigational signal rather than a substantive entry.
None of the historical dictionaries fully develops the relationship between forestalling and the paired offenses of engrossing and regrating, which limits their utility for researchers approaching the market-regulation dimension. Blackstone's Commentaries (Book IV) remains a better primary source for that doctrinal context than any of these dictionary entries.
Jurisdictional Note
Forestalling as a distinct criminal offense is a creature of English common law with no significant American common law development as an independent doctrine. American sources that mention forestalling typically do so in historical commentary or in the context of trade regulation history. Researchers working in American legal materials should not expect forestaller to appear as an operative legal term outside the colonial period.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forest Courts; Market Regulation in English Common Law; Engrossing and Regrating.