Definition
In old English forest law, to fawn; to bring forth the young of deer. The term appears in medieval Latin forest law texts and denotes the act of a deer giving birth or dropping fawns within a forest. As a legal matter, the timing and regulation of fawning were significant to the administration of royal forests, where the season of fawning carried distinct protections and restrictions on activity within the forest bounds.
Burrill notes that founinare is most likely a corruption or misprint of feonare or foinisare, suggesting the term as it appears in some manuscript sources reflects scribal error rather than a stable legal word of art.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is of narrow but genuine relevance to researchers working in medieval English forest law, where a specialized and largely obsolete Latin vocabulary governs the sources. Several practical cautions apply:
First, the word itself may not be stable across manuscripts. Burrill's identification of founinare as a probable corruption of feonare or foinisare means a researcher encountering this spelling in a transcribed source should treat it with caution and cross-check against the underlying Latin text. Variant spellings across manuscript copies of Fleta and similar treatises are common, and what appears in a printed edition may reflect an editor's or printer's error rather than the original term.
Second, the primary source cited — Fleta, lib. 2, c. 41, § 33 — is the natural starting point for any researcher tracing this term. Fleta is a late thirteenth-century English legal treatise, heavily derivative of Bracton, and its forest law provisions reflect the administrative reality of Angevin and early Plantagenet royal forest governance. Researchers should consult a reliable edition of Fleta directly rather than relying solely on dictionary descriptions.
Third, the substantive legal context matters for interpretation. Forest law distinguished carefully between different seasons and activities: the fence month (the period around fawning when does were protected and activity in the forest was restricted) was a recognized legal interval with enforcement consequences. Understanding founinare or its cognates requires situating the term within that seasonal and regulatory framework, not reading it as an isolated vocabulary item.
Finally, researchers should be aware that forest law vocabulary rarely appears in standard common law dictionaries beyond a handful of specialist sources. Burrill is one of the few American law dictionaries to engage with this material at all. For deeper coverage, purpose-built glossaries of medieval forest law and the historical scholarship on the royal forests will be more productive than general legal dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source in the Law Mind corpus to record this term, and its entry is brief but precise. Burrill gives the Latin form, the forest law context, a plain English gloss (to fawn; to bring forth the young of the deer), and a direct citation to Fleta. He also flags the orthographic instability of the word, identifying founinare as likely a corruption or misprint of feonare or foinisare — a useful caution that distinguishes his treatment from a bare gloss.
No other historical law dictionaries in the standard shelf (Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier, Black) appear to have carried this term, reflecting both the obscurity of forest law vocabulary by the nineteenth century and the highly specialized nature of the source material. Burrill's coverage of old forest law terms is generally more complete than his contemporaries, likely drawing on his broader engagement with Latin legal sources.
The underlying authority, Fleta, is a well-documented medieval treatise. Researchers should note that modern scholarly editions with apparatus are preferable to older printed versions for tracing variant readings.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to old English royal forest law and has no application in American or modern Commonwealth legal practice. It is relevant only in the context of medieval English legal history and the interpretation of pre-modern forest law texts.