Definition
An Old Law French verb meaning to forfeit. Derived from the Latin *forisfacere*, FORFAIRE appears in early English legal records and treatises as an operative term signaling the loss of a right, property, or legal interest as a consequence of some act or omission — typically a breach of duty, commission of a crime, or violation of a legal condition. It is not a term of modern practice but survives in historical legal instruments, Norman French pleadings, and early statutory texts where it functions as both verb and participle.
FORFAIRE carries several conjugated and adjectival forms encountered in the sources:
1. FORFACE — the imperative or third-person present form: shall forfeit.
2. FORFIST — past tense: forfeited, as in *et issi forfist ele dower* (and so she forfeited dower).
3. FORFAIT / FORFAICT — participial adjective: forfeited; describing property or rights already lost.
These are not independent terms of art but grammatical variations of the same root concept, all pointing to the act or completed fact of forfeiture.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): FORFAIRE has no standard entry in modern English dictionaries. Its French cognate *forfaire* means to transgress or to act wrongly — closer to wrongdoing generally than to the specific legal consequence of loss.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered. The related English word *forfeit* is defined as: to lose or render confiscable by some fault, offense, or crime; to lose the right to by some error, offense, or crime.
The gap here is directional. In ordinary French usage, the root term emphasizes the transgressive act itself. In Old Law French legal usage, FORFAIRE emphasizes the legal consequence — the loss or confiscation — rather than the wrongdoing that triggered it. The legal term is thus result-focused where the common-language origin is act-focused.
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Why It Matters in Research
FORFAIRE is a navigational term for researchers working in early English legal history, particularly in Norman French sources from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. Its primary significance is textual: encountering FORFAIRE or its conjugated forms in a manuscript or transcription signals a forfeiture provision and requires attention to what right or property is at stake and under what condition it is lost.
The Britton citations in Burrill (c. 12 and c. 110) are the anchor references. *Britton*, the late-thirteenth-century English law treatise written in Law French and attributed to the reign of Edward I, uses FORFAIRE and its variants systematically across its treatment of felonies, dower, and land rights. Researchers consulting Britton in any edition — including the Nichols translation — will encounter these forms and need to recognize them as forfeiture language rather than as terms requiring separate doctrinal analysis.
The dower example (*et issi forfist ele dower*) is particularly instructive for property history researchers: it illustrates that forfeiture of dower rights was treated as a direct legal consequence of a wife's conduct, and the language FORFAIRE/FORFIST signals that consequence in the original French text. Translators and abstractors sometimes render this simply as "lost" or "was deprived of," which can obscure the legal mechanism.
Researchers should also note the relationship between FORFAIRE and its Latin equivalent FORISFACERE. Where Latin records use FORISFACERE, Norman French records of the same period use FORFAIRE. These terms operate in parallel across the bilingual legal culture of medieval England. Searching one without awareness of the other risks incomplete retrieval in document collections that mix Latin and Law French.
The conjugated forms (FORFIST, FORFAIT, FORFAICT) are not indexed consistently across historical glossaries. Kelham's *Norman-French Dictionary*, cited in Burrill, is the most useful secondary source for variant spellings and contextual usage.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the principal source and treats FORFAIRE economically but precisely: it identifies the Law French origin, the Latin root, and provides working examples from Britton with enough grammatical context to show how the term functioned across its forms. Burrill's entry does exactly what a practitioner's dictionary of the period needed to do — it decodes the term for a reader encountering it in an old instrument and points to the source text.
What Burrill does not do is provide doctrinal elaboration on the forfeiture rules themselves. The entry is purely lexical. For the substance of what could be forfeited, under what conditions, and with what procedural requirements, researchers must look to Britton directly, to Bracton's *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae* for the Latin parallel treatment, and to later common law commentators who absorbed and restated these rules in English.
No divergence among historical dictionary sources is noted because only Burrill covers this term at the necessary level of specificity. General dictionaries do not enter it.
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Jurisdictional Note
FORFAIRE is a term of English legal history operating within the Norman French legal tradition transplanted to England after 1066. It has no operative role in modern Anglo-American jurisdictions. Researchers encountering it are working in historical English law, not in any current legal system.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forfeiture — for the doctrinal history and modern law of property and rights forfeiture of which FORFAIRE is the early linguistic marker.
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