Definition
An obsolete term from old English land records denoting the outer or foremost portion of a furlong — specifically, the narrow strip or slip of land lying at the edge of a furlong adjacent to a highway. The forschet functioned as a boundary feature in the open-field system of medieval English agriculture, marking the transitional zone between the cultivated strip holdings of a furlong and the public road running alongside them.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in medieval English manorial records, surveys, and antiquarian commentaries on parish land tenure. Researchers encountering it in old deeds, terriers, or estate documents should treat it as a locational descriptor within the open-field system rather than a term of legal right or title. Its significance is cartographic and descriptive: it tells you where a parcel sits relative to the furlong's edge and the adjoining road, not what tenure governs it.
The primary modern research value is in correctly interpreting boundary calls in early English conveyances and manorial surveys. Mistaking forschet for a term of tenure or a type of easement would be an error. It describes physical location, not legal status.
Burrill's entry cross-references Cowell's law dictionary and Kennett's Parochial Antiquities — both are standard antiquarian sources for open-field terminology. Researchers working on English land history should consult Kennett directly for contextual discussion of furlong structure and the role of highway-adjacent strips. The term has no meaningful survival into modern legal usage and will not appear in post-enclosure land records with any frequency.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary English-language legal dictionary source for this term. His entry derives it from the Saxon components for (before, fore) and sceat (a part or portion), rendered in Latin records as forscheta. Burrill's definition is narrow and consistent with the agrarian geography of the open-field system: the forschet is the slip of land at the near end of a furlong, bordering the highway.
Burrill cites Kennett's Parochial Antiquities at pages 531 and 535, and Cowell. These citations point to well-established antiquarian scholarship on English parish and manorial custom. No meaningful divergence exists among the sources that treated this term — it was a narrow, technical descriptor used in a specific agricultural-legal context and never acquired the contested or evolving meaning that characterizes many old English land terms.
What historical dictionaries do not provide, and what no legal dictionary can supply for a term this archaic, is a body of case law interpreting or applying it. The term belongs to record-keeping and survey practice, not to litigation. Researchers should not expect to find judicial construction of this word.
Jurisdictional Note
Exclusively English in origin and application. The term is specific to the open-field agricultural system of medieval and early modern England. It has no equivalent usage in Scots, Welsh, Irish, or colonial American land records.