Definition
In old English law, a period of time allowed to a party to seek advice or take counsel before being required to act or answer. The term describes a formal grant of time for deliberation — essentially a recognized interval during which a person could consult an advisor, typically before entering into a legal obligation or responding to a legal demand.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in medieval English legal sources and in dictionaries that preserved archaic terminology from that period. Researchers working in early common law materials — particularly pre-modern English proceedings, ecclesiastical records, or manorial court rolls — may encounter furst and fondung as a procedural notation indicating that a party was granted leave to deliberate. It does not appear in modern legal usage and carries no operational meaning in contemporary law.
The chief research trap is the source material from which the definitions derive. All four historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus trace the definition to Jacob's Law Dictionary, a single upstream source. Bouvier, Black's (both editions), and Rapalje & Lawrence are essentially repeating Jacob without independent elaboration. A researcher who finds apparent agreement across these dictionaries should not treat that as corroboration — it is convergence on a single citation, not independent verification.
No jurisdictional variation is meaningful here; the term belongs to a dissolved stratum of English legal procedure and was never transplanted into American or post-medieval English practice.
Researchers who encounter the term in primary sources should look to it as a procedural marker rather than a substantive legal concept. It signals delay or deliberation, not a right, a remedy, or a cause of action.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four corpus sources agree on the definition — time to advise or take counsel — and all trace back to Jacob's Law Dictionary. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier use nearly identical language. Rapalje & Lawrence preserves the same definition but is notable for what immediately follows in the source text: an entry on "Further" and "Further Advance," suggesting furst and fondung appeared as a brief interstitial entry rather than a term of any extended treatment.
None of the corpus dictionaries provide historical examples, case illustrations, or procedural context beyond the bare definition. This is itself informative: the term was included because lexicographers felt obligated to catalog archaic vocabulary, not because the term had ongoing legal relevance even at the time of publication. Bouvier's entry is the most concise — a single line citing Jacob — and is representative of how thinly documented this term is even in the historical record.
What the historical sources do not address: whether furst and fondung was a fixed or discretionary period, how it was invoked, what proceedings it applied to, or how it related to analogous concepts like essoin (an excuse for non-appearance) or continuance. Researchers needing that context will need to look beyond the dictionary literature to primary medieval sources or specialized scholarship in early English legal history.