Definition
An archaic legal term appearing in Domesday Book denoting the same offense or concept as forestalling — the intercepting of goods, merchants, or travelers on the road before they could reach a market or fair, thereby disrupting lawful trade. The term is a variant spelling of forestal and forstal, all of which reduce to the same underlying practice condemned in medieval English law. Forestalling, in its core sense, encompassed the act of meeting and buying goods before they arrived at market, inducing sellers to raise prices, or blocking the road to prevent sellers from reaching the marketplace at all. The physical obstruction aspect — stopping persons or goods on the highway — was inseparable from the commercial harm the law sought to prevent.
Common Confusion
FORISTEL, FORESTAL, FORSTAL, FORESTALL: These are not distinct offenses but variant spellings of a single concept across different manuscripts, periods, and scribal conventions. Researchers encountering any of these forms in historical documents should treat them as interchangeable references to the same practice. The modern English word "forestall" descends directly from this family of terms but has shed most of its legal freight; in contemporary usage it means simply to prevent or preempt something, with no necessary connection to markets, roads, or commercial regulation.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in two contexts: Domesday Book scholarship and medieval legal antiquarianism. Researchers working in early English legal history should be alert to the full cluster of variant spellings — foristel, forestal, forstal, forestall — since manuscript sources are inconsistent, and a search for only one form will miss cognate appearances. Burrill flags Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum as the authoritative cross-reference, and researchers tracing the term's technical meaning should consult Spelman directly, as his treatment of forestal/forstall provides the etymological and juridical grounding that later dictionaries reproduce secondhand.
The practical legal significance of the underlying concept extends well beyond the spelling variant. Forestalling was a recognized common law offense in England, treated alongside regrating and engrossing as a form of market manipulation. It survived in criminal indictments into the eighteenth century before falling into disuse. For researchers studying market regulation, road law, or the legal history of commercial offenses, foristel as a Domesday-era form is the earliest stratum of a concept with a long doctrinal afterlife. Moving from foristel in Domesday to forestalling in later Year Books and common law indictments is a coherent research trajectory, but the spelling discontinuity can obscure the connection without awareness of the variant forms.
There is also a physical-obstruction dimension worth tracking separately. In some usages, forstal and its variants referred specifically to the act of blocking or ambushing on the highway — an offense against the king's peace as much as against trade. Domesday entries using foristel may carry this road-obstruction meaning rather than the purely commercial sense. Context within the specific Domesday entry should govern interpretation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal — a three-source redirect that identifies foristel as identical to forestal and forstal, notes its appearance in Domesday Book, and points to Spelman. This reflects the term's status as a scribal or orthographic variant rather than an independent legal concept. Burrill does not attempt a substantive definition here because the substantive work is done under the main entries for forestalling and its variants. Researchers should follow Burrill's own cross-reference to Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum for the fullest historical treatment available in the Law Mind corpus's supporting sources. Historical dictionaries generally agree on this term's identity with the forestalling family; there is no meaningful divergence on what foristel denotes, only varying degrees of thoroughness in tracing the variant spellings.