Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning banished. It describes a person who has been formally expelled from a jurisdiction, territory, or the realm by judicial or sovereign authority. The term appears in medieval legal records to denote the status of one subject to banishment as a legal penalty.
Common Confusion
FORISBANITUS, UTLAGATUS (outlaw), and EXILIUM (exile) all describe removal of a person from the legal community or territory, and medieval records sometimes use them interchangeably. The distinctions matter in specialized historical legal research: outlawry (UTLAGATUS) was a formal common-law process by which a person was placed outside the protection of the law and subject to killing with impunity; banishment (FORISBANITUS) was expulsion from the realm, often by royal command or judicial sentence, but did not carry the same consequence of forfeiture of legal protection. EXILIUM was frequently used in the classical Roman sense and absorbed into medieval usage with varying precision. Researchers should not assume that a scribe's choice among these terms reflects a technically consistent distinction.
Why It Matters in Research
FORISBANITUS is a term of purely antiquarian value; no researcher will encounter it in a modern legal context. Its utility lies entirely in reading medieval English legal records, chronicles, and early treatises. The word appears in the chronicle tradition — Rapalje & Lawrence and Bouvier both cite Matthew Paris (Mat. Par. 1245), referring to the Chronica Majora, which records banishments under Henry III. Researchers working with that source or similar 13th-century English materials may encounter the term as a descriptor of status.
The critical research trap is conflating FORISBANITUS with related but legally distinct Latin terms that cluster around banishment, forfeiture, and outlawry in medieval sources. These terms — FORISFACERE, EXILIUM, UTLAGATUS — appear in the same documents and overlap thematically but carry different legal consequences. Bouvier's entry for FORISBANITUS runs immediately into its entry for FORISFACERE (to forfeit; to commit an offence), which signals how closely these concepts were grouped in the medieval mind but should not be read as making them synonymous.
In corpus research, FORISBANITUS will rarely appear as a standalone headword outside the four standard historical dictionaries. Researchers should search variant spellings, as medieval Latin scribal practice was inconsistent. The prefix FORIS- (meaning outside, beyond, or away from) recurs across a family of legal Latin terms; recognizing it as a prefix rather than a root word aids in navigating glossaries and indices in works like Spelman's Glossarium or Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, both of which are the authoritative primary glossary sources for this class of term.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in complete agreement: FORISBANITUS means banished. There is no divergence, qualification, or jurisdictional nuance across Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Bouvier, and Rapalje & Lawrence.
The entries are notably spare. Black's (both editions) confines itself to "In old English law. Banished." Rapalje & Lawrence adds only the Matthew Paris citation. Bouvier matches Rapalje and then pivots immediately to FORISFACERE, which is instructive — Bouvier treats the term as requiring no elaboration beyond the single word and the citation, suggesting it was understood as an incidental term of record rather than a term carrying independent doctrinal freight.
No historical dictionary provides a definition distinguishing FORISBANITUS from synonymous or related terms, nor do any of them address what legal process produced the status or what its practical consequences were. For that level of detail, researchers must go to Spelman and Du Cange directly, both cited by Bouvier in the adjacent FORISFACERE entry.