Definition
Reafforested describes land that has been restored to the legal status of a royal forest after having previously been deafforested — that is, after having been stripped of forest law protections and jurisdiction. The term is the past participle of "to reafforest," meaning the act of reimposing the legal regime of the forest upon land from which it had been removed. This is a term of English forest law, not of modern environmental or land-use law, and carries no relationship to the ecological sense of replanting trees.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simple past and past participle of "reafforest" — to replant a forest on land that had been cleared.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; the term would have been understood through its component parts as the act of restoring a forested condition to land.
The gap here is significant. In ordinary modern English, "reafforested" refers to an ecological or agricultural act — planting trees where none existed. In its legal sense, the term describes a jurisdictional restoration: the reimposition of royal forest law over land, regardless of whether any trees are involved. Land could be legally "afforested" or "reafforested" under the historical English system while remaining largely open ground, and conversely, heavily wooded land might never have been subject to forest law at all.
Common Confusion
Reafforested is easily conflated with the environmental concept of reforestation. These are categorically different ideas. Legal afforestation and deafforestation in the medieval and early modern English tradition referred to the application or removal of a specialized body of royal jurisdiction — forest law — governing hunting rights, vert (vegetation), and venison (game). The presence or absence of trees was incidental. Researchers encountering "reafforested" in historical legal materials should resist reading any ecological meaning into the term.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in materials dealing with English forest law from the medieval period through the seventeenth century. Its practical research significance is narrow but precise.
The statute referenced in both Black's editions — 20 Car. II c. 3 — is the key documentary anchor. Researchers should locate and read that Restoration-era statute directly when the term arises in context, as the Black's entries give no substantive elaboration beyond the bare definition and the citation.
The most important trap for corpus researchers is anachronism: modern forestry, environmental law, and land management materials use "reafforestation" in a wholly different sense. A search across a mixed historical and modern corpus will surface false matches. Filter carefully by era and subject matter.
Researchers working backward through forest law sources should note that the underlying concept of afforestation — imposing royal forest jurisdiction — was itself contentious in English constitutional history. The expansion of royal forests under Norman and Plantagenet kings, and subsequent pressure to deafforest lands through instruments such as the Charter of the Forest (1217), created a legal landscape in which the status of any given tract of land might shift multiple times. Reafforestation, in that context, could represent a royal reassertion of prerogative that subjects had fought to curtail.
Because the corpus of English forest law is specialized and not well integrated into mainstream common law research pathways, researchers may need to consult dedicated treatises on the subject rather than general legal dictionaries for fuller context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary editions provide identical substantive content: the term means that a deafforested forest has been again made a forest, with a citation to 20 Car. II c. 3. The second edition reproduces the first with only minor typographical variation.
Neither edition elaborates on the procedural mechanism for reafforestation, the legal consequences of the status change, or the constitutional history surrounding forest law. This is a case where the historical dictionaries serve as a starting point only. They confirm the term's meaning and anchor it to a statute, but researchers seeking depth on the forest law system — its courts, its officers, its relationship to common law — will find these entries insufficient.
The absence of any treatment of forest law's constitutional dimensions in Black's reflects the marginal relevance of the subject to American legal practice, the dictionary's primary audience. English forest law was never received into American common law in any meaningful way.
Jurisdictional Note
Reafforested is a term of English law with no American common law analog. It will not appear in U.S. legal materials except in historical or comparative legal scholarship. Researchers working in English legal history should be aware that forest law operated through its own parallel court system and is not well captured by standard common law research tools.