Definition
In old English law, an acquittance or discharge given in respect of a previous taking or seizure. The term denoted a formal release from liability arising out of goods or property already taken — essentially, a legal clearance acknowledging that an earlier taking had been lawfully made or was otherwise settled. The concept belongs to the vocabulary of early Anglo-Saxon and medieval English legal administration, where formal documentation of takings and their resolution was necessary to prevent double liability or repeated claims against the same act of seizure.
Why It Matters in Research
Forfeng is a narrow archaic term encountered almost exclusively in close readings of early English legal records and the medieval treatise literature. Researchers working in Anglo-Saxon law, Norman-era property law, or the history of distress and seizure will encounter it in contexts where other instruments of acquittance — releases, quittances, and receipts — are also present. The term carries no surviving operational use in modern law and does not appear in contemporary statutory or case law. Its presence in a source is a reliable marker of very early material.
The primary research trap here is misreading forfeng as a generic term for any taking or forfeiture, when it specifically denotes the acquittance following a taking, not the taking itself. This directional distinction matters when tracing the sequence of events in a historical dispute or record: forfeng signals resolution, not initiation.
Researchers should also note that Burrill traces the term to Fleta, a late thirteenth-century Latin legal treatise of uncertain authorship, compiled roughly contemporaneously with Bracton and similarly useful for understanding the transition from Anglo-Saxon to common law doctrine. Any researcher following this citation to Fleta should use a reliable edition; the passage referenced (lib. 1, c. 47, § 15) addresses procedural matters in the administration of manorial and household law.
Cross-reference to broader instruments of acquittance and release is productive: forfeng sits within a family of early English legal concepts — including quittance, discharge, and acquittance — that together describe the formal machinery by which legal obligations were extinguished or settled.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the only historical dictionary source available for this term, and his entry is brief. He supplies the Anglo-Saxon derivation (fore, before + fangen, to take), the functional meaning (acquittance for a previous taking), and the single citation to Fleta. No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Bouvier's — appear to have carried this term independently, which itself signals how narrow and archaic its usage was even by the time the nineteenth-century legal lexicographers were working.
Burrill's gloss is accurate as far as it goes, but it leaves unaddressed the procedural context in which forfeng would have been granted — who issued it, to whom, and in what circumstances. Researchers seeking that level of detail must go directly to Fleta and to the broader secondary literature on Anglo-Saxon and early Norman legal administration.
Jurisdictional Note
Forfeng is exclusively a term of early English law. It has no cognate in Scots law, canon law, or civilian legal systems, and it did not travel to American or colonial legal practice in any identifiable form.