Definition
A Latin legal term appearing in old English records with two related but distinct senses: (1) a breaking or breaking open, as in the forcible entry into a structure; and (2) the breaking up or plowing of land, referring to newly tilled or recently turned earth. The term derives from the French froissure and appears most often in medieval and early modern legal and documentary records as a descriptor for either criminal acts against property or the physical state of agricultural land.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Frussura domorum: The breaking of houses; housebreaking. Used in old records to describe the forcible entry into a dwelling, a precursor concept to what later legal development would formalize as burglary or breaking and entering.
Frussura terrae: The breaking of land; new-broke land, or land recently plowed up. Used in ecclesiastical and manorial records to describe land newly brought under cultivation.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal and ecclesiastical records, monastic cartularies, and early common law manuscripts. Researchers working in medieval legal history, manorial law, or the history of property offenses may encounter it without ready explanation in modern sources.
The dual sense of the word — violent breaking versus agricultural breaking — creates an interpretive hazard. In criminal or property dispute contexts, frussura almost certainly refers to housebreaking or forcible entry. In land tenure, estate, or ecclesiastical records, it signals recently plowed or newly cultivated ground, which had specific legal significance for determining land value, tithe obligations, or assart status.
The housebreaking sense connects to a broader research thread on the historical development of burglary as a common law offense. Early records tracking criminal liability for nocturnal entry or forcible entry into structures may use frussura domorum before the vocabulary of burglary or breaking and entering becomes standardized. Researchers tracing that doctrinal lineage should note this term as an early marker.
The land-sense connects to manorial and ecclesiastical record research. Frussura terrae could affect titheable status, lord-tenant obligations, or the classification of waste land versus productive land — all of which generated legal disputes documented in manor court rolls and church records.
The term has no continuing life in modern legal usage and will not appear in contemporary statutes, cases, or pleadings. Its research value is exclusively historical.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree on the core dual meaning but differ in depth. Burrill's is the most informative, supplying the French derivation (froissure), the two recognized compound forms with their specific documentary citations (Gervase of Canterbury, circa 1195, for frussura domorum; Monasticon Anglicanum for frussura terrae), and attribution to Cowell and Blount. Bouvier reduces the term to "plowing; a breaking" with only a Cowell citation, capturing only the agricultural sense. Both editions of Black's note both senses briefly, but the first edition entry is partially garbled in the source material, running frussura into the adjacent maxim entries beginning with "Frustra" — a typographical artifact of dictionary pagination that researchers consulting older scanned editions should be aware of.
All four dictionaries ultimately trace back to John Cowell's Interpreter (1607) and Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon (1670), the standard seventeenth-century English legal glossaries for Latin and law-French terms. Neither Cowell nor Blount is a primary source for the term's use; they are themselves glossarists drawing on earlier records. Researchers who need primary documentation should follow Burrill's citations to the Monasticon Anglicanum and Gervase of Canterbury directly.
No modern dictionary treatment adds substantive new analysis. This is a term where the historical dictionaries, taken together, represent essentially the complete available secondary literature.
Jurisdictional Note
Frussura is a term of English legal history and appears in records from the English common law tradition and its ecclesiastical and manorial record-keeping practices. It has no equivalent usage in Scottish, continental, or American legal sources.