Definition
A Norman French legal term appearing in medieval English legal sources with two distinct but related senses:
1. Out; without. From the Latin foris, meaning outside or beyond. Used in early legal texts to indicate exclusion or exteriority.
2. Force. Used in medieval pleading and legal narrative to denote compulsion, strength, or armed power. Appears in compounds and phrases describing coercive acts, particularly the gathering of men and resources for forcible purposes.
Both senses derive from distinct etymological roots that converged in Anglo-Norman legal usage, creating a term that could carry either spatial or coercive meaning depending on context.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Appears only in the fixed phrase "fors and againsts," a variant form of "pros and cons," meaning considerations for and against a proposition.
Historical common usage (Latin): In classical Latin, fors (genitive fortis) meant chance, luck, or hazard — a goddess of fortune personified. Unrelated to the legal Norman French usage.
The legal Norman French fors has no meaningful connection to either modern English usage. Researchers encountering the term in medieval sources should not import any sense of chance, fortune, or deliberative balance into the legal reading. The word operates purely as a term of position (out) or coercion (force) depending entirely on context.
Common Confusion
The two legal meanings — out and force — can produce misreadings in untranslated Norman French passages. A phrase like amys coiller et fors does not mean "to collect friends and go outside" but rather "to collect friends and force," describing the assembly of men for coercive purposes. Treating fors as merely a preposition of exclusion in passages describing violent or military conduct will distort the legal sense entirely.
Additionally, the Latin fors (chance, fortune) appears in classical sources sometimes cited alongside medieval legal texts. The two are unrelated and should not be conflated.
Why It Matters in Research
Fors is a navigational hazard in Britton, Bracton-era texts, and other Norman French legal manuscripts. It appears without gloss in many early printed editions, and modern legal dictionaries largely ignore it. Researchers working in:
— Medieval criminal and tort law will encounter fors in descriptions of forcible entry, riot, and assembly. The coercive sense is dominant in these contexts.
— Property and jurisdictional texts may encounter the exclusionary sense, particularly in phrases demarcating what lies outside a grant, a franchise, or a court's authority.
— Burrill is the primary secondary source in the Anglo-American tradition that registers both senses, though his treatment is brief. Kelham's Norman-French dictionary is the deeper reference for the exclusionary meaning.
The term becomes rare after the fifteenth century as Law French itself declined. It does not survive into modern common law vocabulary as a technical term, meaning corpus searches for fors in post-Tudor materials are unlikely to yield relevant results unless the text is a translation, digest, or quotation from an earlier source.
Researchers should flag any occurrence of fors in context before rendering a translation. The surrounding legal action — whether it concerns property limits and grants, or assembly, compulsion, and violence — will almost always resolve the ambiguity.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source here and his entry, while minimal, is accurate on both points. He identifies the exclusionary sense (from Latin foris) on the authority of Kelham, and the coercive sense (force) with a citation to Britton, chapter 44, where the phrase amys coiller et fors appears in discussion of unlawful assembly and the gathering of armed retinues. The Britton citation is genuine and researchable.
What Burrill does not do is disentangle the two meanings analytically or explain how a reader should distinguish them in context. That gap is consequential. He treats the entry as a short gloss rather than a term requiring interpretive instruction, which reflects the general limitation of nineteenth-century law dictionaries when handling Norman French vocabulary: they identify, but rarely explain.
No other major Anglo-American historical dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier, not Tomlin's — carries an entry for fors. This makes Burrill the ceiling of ready secondary support, and researchers needing more will go directly to Kelham or to the original Norman French sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Fors is a term of historical English law only. It has no parallel technical usage in civil law, Scots law, or American legal sources. Research significance is confined to texts within the English common law tradition predating the decline of Law French.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Norman French Legal Terms
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Force and Fear in Medieval Law
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Britton (Legal Treatise)