Definition
Fugatio is a feudal-era legal term denoting a formal privilege or grant entitling the holder to hunt over a defined territory. It is a species of incorporeal hereditament — a right attached to land or conferred by grant rather than arising from mere physical possession of the soil. Like similar hunting privileges of the medieval period, fugatio existed as a creature of royal or lordly grant and was enforceable as against others who might otherwise assert competing rights over the same lands.
Why It Matters in Research
Fugatio is a rare term that surfaces almost exclusively in medieval English legal records, Latin-language charters, and treatises dealing with forest law and manorial rights. Researchers working in colonial American legal materials or early common law texts may encounter it when examining grants of manor rights or privileges appurtenant to land. It belongs to a cluster of archaic hunting and forest right terms — alongside free warren, free chase, and park — that defined the layered structure of property rights over wild animals in the English legal tradition.
The principal research trap is treating fugatio as interchangeable with the broader category of hunting privileges. While all such rights derived from grant and operated against the backdrop of royal forest law, they were technically distinct in scope and subject matter. A grant of free warren, for example, was bounded by specific categories of small game, whereas fugatio more broadly designated a hunting liberty. Researchers should not assume that historical sources using different Latin terms are describing legally identical rights.
Fugatio does not appear in major American legal dictionaries after the early nineteenth century, reflecting the practical disappearance of feudal hunting privileges as operative legal concepts in the United States. It remains relevant primarily for historical legal research, particularly in English legal history, manorial records, and the history of property law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's treatment of fugatio is sparse: the entry cites Wharton and Blount and defines the term simply as "a privilege to hunt." This brevity is itself informative. By the time Bouvier compiled his dictionary, fugatio had no active legal application in American practice and was preserved largely as a reference term for those reading old English texts or charters. Blount's Nomo-Lexicon (1670), a seventeenth-century English law dictionary, is a natural source for terms of this character, as it systematically catalogued Latin and Norman-French legal vocabulary that had fallen into disuse even by the Restoration period. The citation to Wharton likely refers to one of the editions of Wharton's Law Lexicon, which similarly preserved archaic terminology.
No substantive divergence appears across these sources because the term never generated doctrinal litigation complex enough to produce competing definitions. Its legal content was fixed at the point of grant; disputes would have concerned the scope of a particular grant, not the meaning of the term itself.
Jurisdictional Note
Fugatio as an operative legal concept belongs entirely to English medieval and early modern law and has no recognized American legal counterpart. In England, hunting privileges of this type were effectively abolished or rendered obsolete by nineteenth-century game law reform. Researchers outside English legal history will encounter the term only in historical or comparative contexts.