Definition
An archaic legal term with two distinct senses:
1. Exception or reservation. In its primary sense, forprise denotes an exception or reservation carved out from a grant, lease, or conveyance — something withheld from the general scope of the instrument. The grantor or lessor retained a specific right, parcel, or interest that would otherwise pass under the broader transfer.
2. Exaction. In a secondary sense, forprise was used to mean any exaction — a compulsory taking or levy — though this usage appears to have been less common and is encountered mainly in older authorities.
---
Common Confusion
Forprise and exception are often treated as interchangeable in historical texts, and in practical effect they frequently were. However, a strict technical distinction occasionally surfaces in older conveyancing doctrine: an exception withdraws part of the thing granted from the grant entirely (so it never passes), while a reservation creates a new right in favor of the grantor out of what is granted. Forprise as used in historical instruments does not always observe this distinction rigorously, and researchers should not assume the drafter intended one meaning over the other without examining the instrument's full context.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Forprise is a dead term for active practice but a live term for historical legal research. It appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English conveyancing instruments — deeds, leases, and indentures from the medieval and early modern periods — and in glossaries and law dictionaries derived from that tradition (Cowell, Blount, Cunningham). Researchers working with original conveyances or transcriptions of English land records from roughly the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries may encounter it in the operative language of instruments, either as "forprise" standing alone or in formulaic phrases reserving specific interests to the grantor.
The dual meaning — exception/reservation on one hand, exaction on the other — is a genuine interpretive trap. In a conveyancing context the term almost certainly signals a reservation or carve-out. In a fiscal or governmental record context, it may indicate a levy or compulsory payment. The surrounding document type is the primary interpretive guide.
Researchers should also note that none of the historical dictionary sources provide case law or statutory authority; they cite only to legal glossarists (Cowell, Blount, Cunningham). This means forprise never developed a robust doctrinal body, and its meaning in any given instrument is essentially a question of historical linguistic usage rather than established legal doctrine. Do not expect judicial construction of the term in reported cases.
The term has no meaningful modern survival in U.S. or U.K. law. It will not appear in modern statutes, regulations, or court opinions except in historical quotation. Its research value is confined to the interpretation of historical documents and the study of conveyancing history.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Bouvier's — are in complete agreement on substance, and all three trace back to the same two authorities: Cowell (John Cowell's *The Interpreter*, 1607) and Blount (Thomas Blount's *Nomo-Lexikon*, 1670). Bouvier adds Cunningham's Law Dictionary as an additional source for the exaction sense. This convergence tells researchers something important: by the time these American dictionaries were compiled, forprise had already retreated entirely into the historical glossary tradition. Black and Bouvier were not reporting a living term but preserving an antique one.
Bouvier's entry appends a separate term, FORSCHEL or FORSCHET (a strip of land lying next to the highway), immediately after FORPRISE. This adjacency is alphabetical coincidence, not conceptual connection, but researchers scanning microfilm or digitized pages should be alert to the two entries bleeding together in reproduction.
The second edition Black's entry reproduced in the source material appears to contain a scanning or transcription error — the text jumps mid-entry into material about Roman formulary procedure (the *per formulas* system and the Lex Aebutia). This is almost certainly a pagination artifact from the original volume and has no bearing on the definition of forprise itself.
None of the historical dictionaries offer examples of the term in context, quotation from instruments, or any guidance on the exaction sense beyond the bare statement that such a usage exists. Researchers seeking richer examples should consult Cowell's *The Interpreter* directly.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Forprise is an English legal term and has no distinct American doctrinal history. It may appear in early colonial conveyances that imported English formulaic language, but it carries no jurisdiction-specific American meaning. Researchers encountering it in American instruments should read it according to its English conveyancing heritage.
---