Definition
An obsolete term of old English law with two distinct meanings:
1. The unlawful taking of provisions from persons at fairs or markets before royal purveyors had obtained the necessaries required for the sovereign. Under the Crown's prerogative of purveyance, royal agents held the right of first purchase at regulated prices; any private party who preempted this right by purchasing or seizing provisions ahead of the purveyors committed forfang.
2. The act of seizing and rescuing stolen or strayed cattle from the hands of a thief or from any person in wrongful possession of them. In this sense, forfang also denoted the reward or compensation fixed by law for the person who performed such a rescue.
Common Confusion
The two meanings of forfang point in opposite directions and should not be conflated. The first meaning describes an offense — wrongfully anticipating a royal prerogative. The second describes a legally sanctioned act and its accompanying reward — the recovery of wrongfully held property. A researcher encountering the term in a historical source must determine from context which sense is intended. The cattle-rescue meaning is absent from Bouvier's, which records only the purveyance offense, making Bouvier's an incomplete guide when the term appears in property or livestock disputes.
Why It Matters in Research
Forfang is a dead term with no modern legal application. Its research value is entirely historical: it surfaces in records concerning the Crown's prerogative of purveyance, a deeply contested royal power that generated significant friction between the Crown and Parliament from the medieval period through the seventeenth century. Researchers working in that space should understand that forfang represents the offense side of the purveyance system — the act that disrupted royal provisioning — while the broader institution of purveyance itself is the parent concept.
The cattle-rescue meaning of forfang connects to a separate body of historical law governing theft, strays, and the rights of persons who recovered wrongfully held livestock. That reward function places forfang in conversation with related concepts like salvage (in the maritime context) and the older common-law principles governing the recovery of stolen goods.
Two traps await the unwary researcher. First, the term is rare enough that it may appear only in glossaries and secondary digests rather than in primary records, meaning a researcher who finds it in Cowell or Blount is often at one remove from the underlying source. Second, because Bouvier's captures only one of the two meanings, relying on Bouvier's alone will mislead anyone researching the cattle-rescue or reward sense of the term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's agree on the core purveyance meaning: forfang is the taking of provisions in advance of royal purveyors. The formulation is nearly identical across sources, and all three cite Cowell's legal glossary as authority, with Bouvier's additionally noting Blount. This convergence suggests the sources are drawing from the same thin stream of authority rather than independently verifying the term.
The divergence is significant: Black's (both editions) includes the cattle-rescue meaning and its associated reward; Bouvier's does not. No historical source among the three explains why the same word carried both meanings, or whether they arose independently. The dual meaning likely reflects the compound sense embedded in the underlying Old English or Anglo-Norman root — a "taking before" or "taking in front of" — applied in one context to wrongful preemption and in another to the affirmative act of recovery ahead of a thief retaining possession.
None of the three sources places forfang in the broader statutory or parliamentary history of purveyance, limiting their utility for contextual research.
Jurisdictional Note
Forfang is specific to English law and reflects institutions — royal purveyance, the prerogative rights of the Crown — that have no direct American legal counterpart. It will not appear in American primary sources except in historical or comparative discussions of English common law inheritance.