Definition
An archaic Latin and Old English legal adjective appearing in medieval English legal documents and records. "Fru" (also encountered as "frisca" or "frisc" in related forms) carried three distinct senses in historical usage:
1. Recent or new — used to characterize force or injury as freshly committed, as in the phrase frisca fortia (fresh force), meaning a forcible wrong done so recently that the victim could seek immediate legal remedy.
2. Fresh as opposed to salt — used to describe water or marsh, as in aqua frisca (fresh water) or mariscus friscus (fresh marsh), distinguishing freshwater resources from tidal or saltwater ones for purposes of property rights, fishing rights, and land tenure.
3. Uncultivated or fallow — applied to land lying idle and unworked, as in terra jacens frisca et ad warectam, meaning land lying fresh and fallow, relevant to agrarian tenure, manorial records, and obligations tied to cultivation.
Common Confusion
"Fru" and its cognates should not be confused with the unrelated Latin term "fructus" (fruits, produce, or use of property), which shares no etymological or legal connection. In dense manuscript or abbreviated records, visual similarity between abbreviated Latin terms can mislead; a term rendered in abbreviation may require consulting a specialized Latin legal abbreviation guide before meaning can be confirmed.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "fru" or its variants in medieval English pleadings, manor court rolls, register of writs, or land records should be alert to context before assigning meaning. The same root word shifts substantially in legal significance depending on subject matter: temporal (fresh force), hydrological (fresh water), or agricultural (fallow land). Conflating these senses in historical document analysis can produce significant misreadings — a record describing land as "frisca" does not indicate a recent legal event, but an uncultivated state with implications for rent, tenure, and manorial obligation.
The concept of frisca fortia — fresh force — connects to the broader procedural doctrine of "fresh" or recent wrong-doing, which in medieval practice triggered specific remedies available only within a short time window after the injury. This is the ancestor of what later common law sources call "fresh force" or "fresh suit," both of which carry their own procedural weight in writs and early pleading. Researchers tracing the history of summary or expedited remedies for forcible dispossession should trace this term forward into discussions of fresh force in Fitzherbert, Coke, and the Register of Writs.
For land use and property research, the fallow-land sense of "frisca" appears in manorial records and plea rolls and is a signal term for identifying unproductive or deliberately rested agricultural land. In agrarian history and tenure disputes, this bears on the question of whether land was being used in the manner required by a grant or tenure condition.
Corpus researchers should note that "fru" as a standalone headword is a compressed form used in some dictionaries to index entries that fall under longer and more recognizable cognates — in Burrill, the entry leads directly into "Fresh" and "Frith," indicating that the full substance of these concepts is developed under those headwords. Treating this entry as self-contained would mean missing the bulk of relevant source material.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this term in the present corpus. Burrill treats the entry economically, providing three distinct contextual senses and citing Spelman's Glossarium (a key authority on medieval Latin and Anglo-Saxon legal terminology) as well as the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Register of Original Writs) and Townshend's Entries. These citations anchor the term in the foundational reference apparatus of English legal antiquarianism.
What Burrill does not develop — and what no entry of this compressed type could — is the procedural significance of frisca fortia in the history of forcible entry remedies, or the property law significance of the fallow-land sense in manorial tenure. Researchers should treat this entry as an indexing entry pointing toward "Fresh" and related cognates, not as a complete treatment.
Spelman's authority on the Latin and Anglo-Norman vocabulary of English law is generally regarded as sound for medieval usage, and his glosses on frisca and related forms are consistent with their appearances in primary records.