Definition
A Latin term from old English and medieval law meaning one who has been banished or outlawed — literally, a person cast outside the legal and territorial boundaries of the realm. The forisbannitus was an individual formally expelled from the kingdom by legal process or royal authority, deprived of the protections of law, and rendered effectively stateless within the jurisdiction that expelled him. The term is closely allied with, and often used interchangeably with, forbannitus.
The concept carries two overlapping dimensions: geographic exile (removal from the physical territory of the realm) and legal exile (removal from the protection of the legal order). In practice, these were inseparable — banishment was simultaneously a territorial expulsion and a legal stripping of status.
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Common Confusion
FORISBANNITUS and FORBANNITUS appear as distinct headwords in some historical dictionaries but refer to the same legal condition. Burrill directs readers from FORISBANNITUS to FORBANNITUS, treating them as equivalent forms. Researchers should not assume a substantive legal distinction between the two spellings; variation reflects scribal and editorial inconsistency across medieval Latin sources rather than any difference in legal meaning.
FORISBANNITUS should also be distinguished from FORISFACERE (to forfeit), though the two concepts frequently appear together in medieval sources. Forisfacere describes the act of losing property or rights through fault or crime; forisbannitus describes the status of the person who has been expelled as a consequence of such forfeiture or of outlawry proceedings. A person might forisfacere their lands without becoming a forisbannitus, but a forisbannitus typically had forisfactured country and kingdom both.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval Latin legal texts — Bracton, Glanvill, and related treatises — and in early English legal records written in law Latin. Researchers working in those sources need to recognize it as a status term, not a procedural term: it describes what a person is, not what was done to them.
The Latin construction matters for source navigation. FORIS- as a prefix (meaning "outside" or "without") recurs across a cluster of medieval legal terms — forisfacere, forisfactura, forisbannitus, forisque — all organized around the concept of being cast outside legal protections or property relations. Recognizing the prefix helps researchers move laterally through related entries in Burrill, Spelman's Glossarium, and Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, which remain the principal reference tools for terms of this type.
Because the term belongs to a specific historical and linguistic register, it will not appear in modern statutory or case law. Research encountering this term is by definition working in medieval or early modern legal history, and the interpretive frame must be adjusted accordingly: this is not a living legal concept but a window into how medieval law conceptualized the relationship between legal personality and territorial belonging.
Burrill's redirection to FORBANNITUS is itself a research signal. When a dictionary entry consists primarily of a cross-reference, it usually means the preferred form (here, forbannitus) carries the fuller treatment and should be consulted first.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not provide a substantive entry under FORISBANNITUS, offering only the cross-reference to FORBANNITUS. The substantive content under the adjacent entry FORISFACERE, however, illuminates the conceptual neighborhood: Burrill quotes Bracton directly — "Forisfacit patriam et regnum, et exul efficitur" (he forfeits country and kingdom, and is made an exile) — which captures the dual character of these expulsion-related terms. The quotation comes from Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, folio 128b, a real and verifiable source, and it remains one of the clearest medieval articulations of what banishment meant in legal terms.
Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum is the deeper reference for forisbannitus and its cognates. Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis provides the broadest Latin-language treatment and traces usage across continental and English sources. Neither is represented in Burrill's entry here, which is unusually thin even by the standards of obsolete terms.
Historical dictionaries as a class tend to treat banishment-related terms somewhat unevenly — more attention has been paid to the procedural mechanisms of outlawry (waiver, exigent, caput lupinum) than to the status terms like forisbannitus that describe the resulting condition. Researchers should not take the brevity of the dictionary entry as a sign that the concept was marginal; banishment and outlawry were significant legal institutions in medieval England.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs exclusively to the medieval English common law tradition and its continental analogues. It has no operative meaning in any modern jurisdiction and appears in legal research only in historical and comparative contexts.
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