Definition
In old English law, a son was forisfamiliated when his father formally assigned him a portion of the family land during the father's lifetime, gave him seisin (possession) of that land, and did so at the son's own request or with his free consent — the son acknowledging himself satisfied with that share. The condition was defined by the combination of a voluntary transfer, delivery of seisin, and the son's expressed acceptance of the portion as his settlement. Once forisfamiliated, the son was effectively severed from further inheritance claims against the remaining family estate; he had taken his portion early and was, in a meaningful sense, set outside the family's future succession.
Common Confusion
Forisfamiliated is sometimes loosely read as synonymous with disinheritance, but the two are distinct. Disinheritance is a unilateral paternal act cutting off an heir without compensation. Forisfamiliation was consensual and transactional — the son received land, accepted it as sufficient, and was thereby barred from further claims. The legal consequence (exclusion from the remaining estate) may look similar, but the mechanism and its legitimacy under old English law were entirely different.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost entirely to the medieval English common law of inheritance and will not appear in modern legal materials except as a historical reference. Researchers working in early English legal history — particularly sources predating or contemporary with Glanvill and Bracton — will encounter the concept in discussions of how land passed among heirs and what claims a son who had already received a portion could make against the residue of the father's estate.
The key research trap is temporal scope. By the time English inheritance law had evolved through the Statute of Wills (1540) and the later development of testamentary practice, the specific mechanism of forisfamiliation as a formal legal category had largely dissolved into broader doctrines of advancement and satisfaction. A researcher importing the term's technical precision into later periods will find it does not carry the same freight.
The concept connects directly to the doctrine of advancement in equity — the idea that a gift from parent to child during the parent's lifetime may be treated as a prepayment of the child's inheritance share. Modern advancement doctrine is the functional descendant of the forisfamiliation concept, but stripped of its feudal formalities. Corpus searches for forisfamiliated that yield results from equity treatises or chancery materials are likely tracking that conceptual lineage rather than the strict old English law form.
Note also that the son's consent was not merely procedural courtesy. It was the operative element that distinguished forisfamiliation from a simple inter vivos gift and that grounded the bar to future claims. Sources that omit the consent element are describing something different.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill are in complete agreement on this term — the definitions are functionally identical, all tracing to the same sources. Burrill's entry adds the citations to Glanvill (lib. 7, c. 3) and the Regiam Majestatem (lib. 2, c. 33, § 8), placing the doctrine squarely in the foundational texts of early English and Scots feudal law. Both Black's editions cite Reeve's History of English Law (vol. 1, pp. 42 and 110), which provides historical context for the doctrine's operation.
The historical dictionaries do not address the relationship between forisfamiliation and later equitable doctrines of advancement, nor do they flag that the term's practical significance had diminished well before the modern period. For researchers, this silence is informative: the term was already archaic when these dictionaries were compiled, treated as a matter of legal history rather than living doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to old English common law and appears in Scottish legal sources (Regiam Majestatem) in a parallel form. It has no recognized independent existence in modern U.S., English, or Commonwealth law. Its relevance in American legal research is confined to historical or comparative contexts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Feudal Land Tenure
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Inheritance and Descent
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Doctrine of Advancement