Definition
Forisfacta (also rendered *forisfactum* in some sources) is a Latin term from medieval English law referring to goods forfeited to the crown upon conviction of treason or felony. The name reflects the legal theory underlying forfeiture: that the ownership of the property had, by operation of law, passed out of the hands of the offender — literally "gone away out" from the owner. The goods became crown property as a consequence of the attainder, not by seizure in the ordinary sense, but because the felony or treason was understood to have severed the owner's title entirely.
The term belongs to the vocabulary of attainder and escheat, and is closely related to the broader doctrine of forfeiture that attached both to real and personal property upon conviction of serious offenses under the common law.
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Common Confusion
Forisfacta should not be confused with escheat, though both result in property passing to the sovereign. Escheat operated primarily on real property and arose from failure of heirs or attainder of blood; forisfacta referred specifically to personal goods forfeited as a direct consequence of the criminal conviction itself. The practical distinction mattered in historical English practice — the crown's title to forisfacta vested at the commission of the offense, not the conviction, a rule with significant consequences for intervening creditors and transferees.
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Why It Matters in Research
Forisfacta appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth century English legal sources. Researchers encountering the term in historical records — including crown pleadings, inquisitions post mortem, and early treatises on criminal law — should understand it as a technical term of art tied to the English law of attainder, which was substantially dismantled in the United States by constitutional prohibition and in England by statutory reform.
The term surfaces in contexts where later sources would simply use "forfeited goods" or "goods forfeited by attainder." Because American law rejected corruption of blood and most forms of common law attainder forfeiture at the founding, forisfacta has no operative descendant in American legal practice. Researchers in U.S. sources after 1789 who encounter the term are almost certainly dealing with a historical quotation, a treatise passage, or a learned reference backward to English common law.
A practical trap: some secondary sources use forisfacta loosely to refer to any forfeited property, collapsing the distinction between goods forfeited by conviction (forisfacta proper), lands escheated by attainder, and deodands (objects forfeited for causing accidental death). These are distinct legal categories and should not be treated as interchangeable when reconstructing historical property rights or tracing crown title.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence give the essential definition concisely: goods forfeited for treason or felony, the property having "gone away out of the owner." This gloss correctly captures both the descriptive and theoretical dimensions of the term. The Latin root — *foris* (outside, away) and *facta* (made, done) — supports the reading that the legal act of conviction caused the property itself to be treated as having departed the owner's estate.
Standard historical dictionaries of English law, including Tomlin's and Bouvier's earlier editions, address the broader category of forfeiture at length but do not always give forisfacta its own entry, treating it as subordinate vocabulary within discussions of attainder and felony. This means the term's precise technical meaning is better preserved in the Latin-heavy treatise literature — Bracton, Britton, and Fitzherbert — than in alphabetically organized law dictionaries, which tend to fold it into the entry for "forfeiture" or omit it altogether. Researchers should not assume silence in a historical dictionary signals that the term was unused; it may simply have been treated as self-evident Latin rather than a term requiring definition.
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Jurisdictional Note
Forisfacta is a term of English common law with no direct American counterpart. The U.S. Constitution (Art. III, § 3) limits forfeiture for treason, and the doctrine of corruption of blood was broadly rejected in American jurisdictions. Modern American civil and criminal forfeiture statutes operate on entirely different doctrinal foundations.
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