Definition
An archaic Law French term for forgery — the criminal act of falsely making, altering, or counterfeiting a document, instrument, or signature with intent to defraud. The term appears in early English legal records and Year Books as the direct Law French equivalent of the modern English "forgery." It carries no independent legal meaning distinct from forgery; it is simply the older linguistic form of the same concept.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not a current entry. The word does not appear in modern standard English dictionaries as a living term.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. By the nineteenth century, "forgement" had been entirely displaced by "forgery" in both legal and common usage.
Editorial note: Because "forgement" survives only in historical legal records and has no modern common counterpart, the gap between common and legal meaning is not a practical research concern. The term's significance is purely linguistic and archival — a researcher encountering it in a primary source needs to know it means forgery, nothing more.
Common Confusion
FORGEMENT vs. FORGERY: These are not two distinct offenses. Forgement is the Law French predecessor to the English-language term forgery. They denote the same wrong. A researcher who encounters "forgement" in a Year Book or early plea roll and treats it as a separate or specialized crime is misreading the source. The concepts are identical; only the language differs, reflecting the transition from Law French to English as the operative language of English common law pleading and reporting.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance of this term is almost entirely confined to researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal materials — Year Books, plea rolls, and early reports from roughly the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. A few specific cautions apply:
First, Law French terms like forgement appear without translation in Year Book entries and early abridgments. Researchers unfamiliar with Law French may encounter the word and fail to recognize it as a forgery reference, particularly if surrounding context involves instruments, charters, or seals rather than what a modern researcher would associate with the crime.
Second, the single citation in Burrill — Yearb. M. 10 Hen. VI. 82 — places the term squarely in the Lancastrian period (circa 1431–1432). Year Book references to forgery-related offenses in this era are important context for understanding how the crime was conceptualized before it received comprehensive statutory definition under later Tudor legislation. Researchers tracing the historical development of forgery as a statutory and common law offense should treat forgement citations as early data points in that lineage, not as a distinct body of doctrine.
Third, because forgement appears only sparsely in the historical legal lexicons — Burrill's is the principal English-language legal dictionary to record it — its absence from other major dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's, Tomlin's) is itself informative: it was recognized as an archaism even by nineteenth-century compilers.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only historical legal dictionary entry for this term and does so with notable economy: "L. Fr. Forgery." The single Year Book citation is Yearb. M. 10 Hen. VI. 82. No definition beyond the gloss is offered, which itself confirms that by the mid-nineteenth century forgement was understood as a dead linguistic form requiring only translation, not explanation.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Black's Law Dictionary (early editions), and Tomlin's Law Dictionary do not carry entries for forgement. Their silence is consistent with Burrill's treatment: the term had no independent doctrinal life requiring separate exposition. Its appearance in Burrill reflects that dictionary's particular attention to Law French vocabulary rather than any suggestion that forgement retained practical significance in nineteenth-century legal usage.
The trajectory is clear: forgement was a functional legal term in Law French pleading, was gradually displaced as English supplanted Law French in the courts, and by the early modern period had vanished entirely from active legal vocabulary, leaving forgery as the sole operative term.