Definition
An obsolete English legal term denoting a customary right claimed by keepers of royal forests, bailiffs of hundreds, and similar officers to take provisions — specifically food for the officer himself, fodder for his horse, and food for his dogs — from tenants and inhabitants living within the bounds of the forest, hundred, or other designated jurisdiction. The land subject to this burden was known as *terra putura*. The term appears in variant spellings, most commonly *puture* and *pulture*, with some authorities treating the latter as the more precise form. The custom was essentially a form of compulsory hospitality or purveyance owed to the local administrative officer as an incident of his office, extractable as of right rather than by voluntary gift.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Listed only as an alternative form of *pulture*; no independent common English meaning.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded as a common English word.
The term has no meaningful life outside medieval English legal usage. Unlike many old law terms that drifted into ordinary speech, *puture* remained entirely within the technical vocabulary of forest law and hundred administration and does not appear in general dictionaries as a word with independent meaning.
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Why It Matters in Research
Puture is the kind of term that surfaces unexpectedly in early English land records, forest eyre proceedings, and manorial documents, where its meaning may be assumed rather than explained. Researchers working in pre-Reformation English legal sources should be aware of the following:
**Spelling instability.** The term appears as *puture*, *pulture*, *poulture*, and occasionally in Latinized forms. Historical indexes and finding aids may not cross-reference these variants reliably. A search for one spelling may miss documents using another. Black's first and second editions both acknowledge the *pulture* variant as an alternative or preferred form used by some authorities.
**Conceptual overlap with purveyance.** Puture is closely related to, but distinct from, the broader royal prerogative of purveyance (the Crown's right to take goods for royal use at below-market rates). Puture is narrower — a local officer's customary entitlement, not a royal prerogative claim — but historical sources sometimes conflate the two. Distinguishing them matters when tracing the legal basis of a particular exaction in a historical document.
**Terra putura.** Documents referencing *terra putura* are describing land burdened by this customary obligation, not land of a different tenure class. This phrase is easily misread as a generic descriptive term if the researcher is unfamiliar with puture's meaning.
**Practical obsolescence.** Puture had likely ceased to function as an enforceable custom well before the formal abolition of forest law burdens in the nineteenth century. Encountering it in later sources almost always signals a historical recitation, a formulaic pleading claim, or antiquarian commentary rather than active legal practice.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary provide essentially identical entries, describing puture as a custom claimed by forest keepers and hundred bailiffs to take food for man, horse, and dog from those living within the relevant perambulation. Black's first edition adds the gloss that some authorities, using the *pulture* spelling, explain the term more broadly as a demand in general and trace its origin to monastic practice — though Black's does not develop this derivation or assess its credibility.
Neither edition of Black's provides depth beyond this bare description, which reflects the term's status as a genuine antiquity even at the time those dictionaries were compiled. No treatment of the term's enforcement, its procedural history in the forest eyres, or its relationship to neighboring customs (such as cheminage or pannage) appears in the standard dictionary sources. Researchers needing substantive treatment should look to specialized works on English forest law, such as those dealing with the law of the forest under the Plantagenets, and to the records of the forest eyres themselves. The dictionary sources agree on the core meaning but offer little more than a minimal definition.
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Jurisdictional Note
Puture is exclusively an English legal concept with no transplanted equivalent in American, Scottish, or colonial common law. It belongs entirely to the medieval and early modern English administrative framework of royal forests and hundreds. Researchers working outside English legal history have no occasion to encounter it in operative legal sources.
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