Definition
Forfeiture of silk was a historical English customs enforcement mechanism under which prohibited silk imports were declared forfeit to the Crown. When Parliament banned or restricted the importation of silk — primarily to protect domestic textile manufacturers — silk goods that had been landed and allowed to sit unclaimed in the docks became subject to formal seizure. The forfeiture was proclaimed publicly at each term of the Court of Exchequer, which held jurisdiction over revenue and customs matters. The term does not describe a private legal right or a recurring common-law doctrine; it describes a specific administrative and fiscal procedure tied to a particular era of English trade prohibition.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a historical artifact with no living legal application. Researchers encountering it in primary sources — pleadings, exchequer records, customs registers, or contemporary legal commentaries — should treat it as a marker of the mercantilist trade regime that dominated English commercial law from roughly the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. The silk prohibition laws were periodically enacted, repealed, and re-enacted in response to pressure from domestic weavers, particularly the Spitalfields silk industry, making the precise date of a source document critical to understanding whether a forfeiture proceeding would have been active or dormant at that moment.
The Exchequer proclamation practice is significant for archival research: forfeiture declarations were term-by-term pronouncements, meaning researchers working in Exchequer records should look for them at the seasonal divisions of the legal year (Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter, Trinity terms) rather than as continuous administrative actions.
Do not conflate this mechanism with modern civil forfeiture. The structural logic — government seizure of goods connected to a legal violation — is superficially similar, but the procedural, constitutional, and evidentiary frameworks are entirely different. Modern forfeiture doctrine, whether civil or criminal, carries due process requirements, burden-of-proof allocations, and innocent owner defenses that have no parallel in the Exchequer proclamation practice.
For researchers tracing the genealogy of forfeiture law, this entry represents the customs-and-revenue branch of the forfeiture family tree, not the criminal or punitive branch.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's sole entry on this term is terse and descriptive: "When the importation of silk was prohibited it was customary at each term of the Exchequer to proclaim a forfeiture of such as was suffered to lie in the docks." Bouvier makes no attempt to connect the practice to broader forfeiture doctrine or to indicate whether any American analogue existed. The entry reads as a historical footnote included for completeness rather than as a doctrine with ongoing relevance.
Notably, Bouvier does not cite the specific statutes authorizing the silk prohibition or the forfeiture procedure, which limits the entry's usefulness as a research starting point for primary sources. Researchers seeking the statutory basis should look to English trade legislation of the eighteenth century, including acts addressing the Spitalfields weavers and the broader framework of the Navigation Acts era.
No other standard American legal dictionaries treat this term as a standalone entry, reflecting its purely English and historical character.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Civil Forfeiture and Its Intersection with Criminal Law (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
Asset Forfeiture in Drug Cases (Civil and Criminal) (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
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