Definition
In old English forest law, a formal inspection or survey of a royal forest. The regardum (also rendered in English as "regard") was a periodic official examination conducted to assess the condition of a forest, identify violations of forest law, and ensure that the king's rights in the forest were preserved. The inspection covered matters such as the taking of game, waste of timber, encroachments on forest land, and the keeping of dogs by persons living within or near the forest. Officers appointed for this purpose, known as regarders, conducted the survey and returned findings to the forest courts.
Common Confusion
REGARDUM, REGARD, and PERAMBULATION are related but distinct forest law procedures. The regardum was the inspection itself — the substantive survey of conditions within the forest. A perambulation, by contrast, was a formal walking or riding of the forest's boundaries to establish or confirm its geographic limits. Researchers encountering both terms in forest records should not treat them as interchangeable; they served different administrative functions and generated different documentary records.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of narrow but specific historical significance. Researchers working in medieval English forest law, royal administration, or land history will encounter it in original forest charters, plea rolls, and administrative records of the Forest Eyre courts. The regardum was a formal legal event generating written returns — those records are primary sources for forest boundaries, rights of common, and violations prosecuted under forest law.
Several traps exist for the modern researcher. First, the Latinized form regardum appears interchangeably with the English "regard" in sources of different periods; both forms refer to the same institution. Second, the procedure is grounded entirely in the medieval English royal forest system, which had no direct parallel in later common law or American law. Any secondary source treating forest law concepts as having survived into modern legal systems should be approached cautiously. Third, Burrill's citation to the Charter of the Forest (Carta de Foresta, 9 Hen. III, c. 5) and to Fleta (lib. 2, c. 41) anchors this term firmly in thirteenth-century sources — researchers should consult those primary texts directly when the details of the procedure matter.
The Carta de Foresta of 1217 (confirmed in the form cited by Burrill in the reign of Henry III) is a foundational document of English forest administration and is the primary statutory source for the regardum. Fleta, the late-thirteenth-century legal treatise, provides procedural elaboration. Both are available in scholarly editions and are the appropriate starting points for any serious research into this term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is characteristically economical: it identifies the term as Latin, places it in old forest law, defines it by its English equivalent "regard," and supplies two primary citations without elaboration. This is sufficient for identification purposes but leaves the researcher to supply context.
What Burrill does not address — and what the corpus researcher should supply from other sources — is the procedural content of the regardum: who conducted it, how often, what it examined, and what followed from the findings. The regarders were typically twelve knights appointed for the purpose; the survey was to occur every three years under forest law norms; and the findings fed into Forest Eyre proceedings where violations were prosecuted. None of this appears in Burrill, making his entry a starting point rather than a complete account.
No significant divergence exists across historical dictionary sources because the term appears only in Burrill within the available corpus. Researchers should treat its definition as settled but incomplete, and should consult specialized works on English forest law — such as those of G.J. Turner or Charles Young — for fuller treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Regardum is exclusively a term of medieval English royal forest law. It has no counterpart in American law and no recognized survival in modern English law following the effective decline of the forest system. The term is encountered only in historical legal research.