Definition
A forstaler is a person who engages in forestalling — the practice of intercepting goods or merchants on their way to market in order to buy up commodities before they reach open sale, thereby manipulating prices to the detriment of the public market. The term designates the actor rather than the act itself. In medieval and early modern English law, the forstaler was a recognized offender against market regulation, subject to penalties under common law and various market statutes aimed at preventing artificial scarcity and price manipulation.
Common Confusion
FORSTALER and REGRATOR and ENGROSSER are three distinct but closely related market offenses that historical sources frequently group together. A forstaler intercepted goods before they reached market. A regrator bought goods at market and resold them at the same or a nearby market for profit. An engrosser bought up large quantities of commodities to corner the supply. The three were often charged together and are easily conflated in older sources, but they address distinct points in the chain of market manipulation. Researchers encountering one term should search for all three.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost exclusively to the historical legal record. Researchers will encounter forstaler in medieval plea rolls, market court records, leet jurisdiction materials, and early common law treatises — not in modern statutory or case law. The term effectively disappears from active legal use after the 19th century, when forestalling as a criminal offense was formally abolished in England.
The primary research trap is orthographic. Historical sources spell the term and its variants inconsistently: forstaller, forestaller, forstalier, and the verb forms forestall and forstall appear interchangeably across different periods and hands. Searching a single spelling will miss substantial material. Latin sources use the term forestallarius or instaliarius, and Anglo-Norman sources use the French forstaller or variants. Any thorough search of manuscript or early print sources must account for this instability.
A secondary trap is jurisdictional scope. Forestalling offenses were enforceable in leet courts, borough courts, and assize of markets proceedings, not only in the common law courts of record. Researchers looking only at common law reporters will find an incomplete picture. Local court rolls and borough records are often the richest sources for actual prosecutions.
The offense also has a constitutional and statutory history worth tracing. Parliamentary statutes addressed forestalling at various points, and the gradual shift from criminal prohibition to mere market regulation tracks broader changes in economic philosophy. By the time Blackstone wrote, the offense was being questioned as contrary to principles of free trade, and the Forestalling Act was eventually repealed.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides a compressed but accurate entry, glossing forstaler from the Law French as meaning to stop, to obstruct, to forestall, with a citation to Littleton's Tenures, section 240. The citation is to Littleton in the context of explaining related feudal and market law vocabulary, not a full treatment of the offense.
Burrill's entry is characteristic of 19th-century legal dictionary treatment of this term: it preserves the word for completeness and traces its linguistic root, but offers little doctrinal content. This reflects the term's declining operational significance by that period. Researchers should not expect the historical legal dictionaries to carry the full weight of the doctrine here — that work must be done through primary sources and institutional treatises such as Coke's Institutes and Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown, both of which address forestalling in substantive detail.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is the distinction between the forstaler as a named legal actor and the broader social history of market regulation in which the offense was embedded. They treat the term as a linguistic artifact rather than situating it within the working institutions of medieval market law.
Jurisdictional Note
The offense of forestalling, and with it the figure of the forstaler, was primarily a feature of English common law and English borough and market law. Scottish law had analogous market regulations but used different terminology. American colonial and early republic law occasionally carried over English market offenses, but forestalling prosecutions were rare and the doctrinal category largely did not take root in American common law development.