Definition
A Latin term from medieval legal Latin meaning "to forfeit" or "to transgress against." In historical common law usage, forfacere denoted the act by which a person lost a right, property, or privilege through some breach of duty, violation of law, or failure to perform an obligation owed to the crown or a feudal superior. The term is the operative verb form from which the noun-based concepts of forfeiture and the closely related Latin forfactura derive. It does not describe a condition or status but the act itself — the doing of that which causes loss.
Common Confusion
Forfacere and forisfacere are variants of the same root concept and are used interchangeably in many historical sources, including Burrill, who redirects readers from forfacere directly to forisfacere. Researchers should not treat them as distinct legal concepts. The distinction, where any exists, is purely orthographic and reflects inconsistency in medieval Latin transcription rather than any difference in legal meaning. Additionally, forfacere should not be confused with forfactura, which names the resulting loss or penalty rather than the act that triggers it.
Why It Matters in Research
Forfacere appears almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal texts, Year Books, early English statutes, and feudal records. Researchers encountering the term in primary sources should treat it as a functional pointer — a verb signaling that a forfeiture event is being described — and then look to the surrounding text for what was forfeited, to whom, and on what legal ground.
The principal research trap is that forfacere, forisfacere, and their derivatives appear inconsistently transliterated and indexed across historical corpora. A search for one spelling may not surface documents using the other. Any corpus search targeting this term should include forisfacere, forfactura, and the English-language forfeiture as parallel search strings.
The term also carries feudal structural significance that later common law stripped away. In early medieval usage, forfacere often implied a breach directed upward through the feudal hierarchy — against a lord or the crown — and the forfeiture that followed was not merely a penalty but a reversion of rights or property to the superior from whom they had been held. That relational dimension disappears in post-feudal forfeiture doctrine, so researchers reading backward from modern forfeiture concepts into early sources risk misunderstanding the scope of what the term was doing in context.
Within the Law Mind corpus, forfacere functions as an entry point into the broader cluster of forfeiture-related terms. It should be read alongside forisfacere for variant usage and alongside forfactura for the consequential side of the same transaction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry for forfacere is a redirect — the full substance is housed under forisfacere, and Burrill cites Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum as the supporting authority. This is typical of how historical legal dictionaries handled variant Latin spellings: one form carries the substantive entry and the others point to it. Researchers should not interpret the brevity of the forfacere entry as indicating the term is marginal; it reflects editorial convention, not legal insignificance.
Burrill's reliance on Spelman is appropriate. Spelman's Glossarium remains a foundational source for medieval Latin legal vocabulary in the English common law tradition, and his treatment of the forisfacere/forfacere cluster is among the more thorough available in pre-modern reference works. What Burrill and Spelman together do not address is the term's procedural role — how forfacere was invoked in pleading, how forfeitures were adjudicated once triggered, or how the concept evolved into the statutory forfeiture regimes of later centuries. For those questions, researchers must move beyond the dictionary literature into the Year Books, Bracton, and early statutory sources directly.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See FORFEITURE for the doctrine's development and modern applications.
See FORISFACERE for the substantive dictionary entry on this term's primary variant form.