Definition
An enclosure or close; specifically, land that has been enclosed and separated from the surrounding area, or the entire compass and extent of a manor. The term captures both the act of enclosing land and the enclosed area itself. In historical English land law, a purprise could denote:
1. A close or enclosed parcel of land, particularly land enclosed from a common, waste, or forest without lawful authority — in which case the term carried connotations of encroachment or wrongful appropriation.
2. The whole compass or circuit of a manor — the outer bounds within which the lord's authority ran.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An enclosed space, such as the land within the borders of a manor.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A close or inclosure; the compass of a manor.
The common and legal definitions are unusually close here, reflecting that purprise was always a term of art with little life outside property law. The legal dimension that common sources understate is the encroachment sense: in forest law and common law pleading, a purprise was not merely any enclosure, but specifically one that could constitute a trespass against the Crown or against common rights — making it a term with potential liability attached, not a neutral descriptor of land boundaries.
Common Confusion
PURPRISE is sometimes run together with PURPURE or PORPRIN in historical dictionaries because the entries appear in close proximity. These are entirely distinct: purpure is a heraldic term for the color purple, with no connection to land law. The proximity in alphabetical dictionaries (including both editions of Black's reproduced here) has occasionally caused transcription errors and misattribution in secondary literature. Researchers encountering the heraldic definition in a land law context have likely hit a typographical or scanning artifact.
Why It Matters in Research
Purprise is an archaic term that surfaces almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English land law sources, forest law proceedings, and manorial records. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus should be alert to several issues:
First, the encroachment meaning was the operationally significant one in practice. Forest law treated purprise — unauthorized enclosure of forest land — as an offense presentable before the forest eyre, alongside assart (clearing of forest) and waste. These three offenses formed a cluster in forest law administration, and sources treating one will often treat the others. A researcher finding purprise in a pleading or presentment should look immediately for the forest law context.
Second, the manorial meaning — the whole compass of a manor — appears in conveyancing language and in descriptions of manorial jurisdiction. Here purprise functions as a boundary term, roughly synonymous with precincts or ambit, and carries no negative connotation.
Third, modern legal research tools index this term poorly or not at all. It will not appear in contemporary secondary literature except in historical surveys of English land law. Primary source searching in Law Mind's older volumes, particularly materials touching on forest administration, manorial courts, or common rights, is the reliable path.
Fourth, the term is essentially extinct in American law. No significant American common law development attached to it. Rapalje & Lawrence's inclusion is purely as a received English term, not as an active American legal concept.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries give substantially the same definition — a close or enclosure, and the compass of a manor — with no meaningful divergence. This consistency reflects the fact that purprise had no contested meaning by the time these dictionaries were compiled; it was already an antiquarian term being preserved rather than actively used.
What the historical dictionaries omit is the forest law dimension, which was the term's most legally consequential application. Bacon, cited in Webster's 1913, used the term in his discussion of forest offenses, and that context supplies the liability and jurisdictional weight that the bare dictionary definitions do not convey. The dictionaries treat purprise as a neutral descriptive term; the forest law sources treat it as a species of trespass. Researchers relying solely on dictionary entries will miss this.
The contamination of the purprise entry with purpure (the heraldic color term) in both editions of Black's reflects a longstanding editorial choice to run adjacent headwords without hard breaks — a formatting pattern common to 19th-century legal dictionaries that can mislead modern readers scanning the page.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forest Law (English); Manorial System; Common Rights and Enclosure.