Definition
An obsolete local custom of the city of Exeter, England, by which the chief lord of a fee could foreclose a tenant's rights in land upon nonpayment of rent. Shortford operated as a summary remedy available to the feudal superior — a mechanism for extinguishing the tenant's interest without resort to ordinary legal process, triggered by the tenant's failure to meet rent obligations. The term has no modern legal application and survives only as a historical artifact of English local tenure law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in antiquarian sources dealing with English local customs, feudal tenure, or the particular legal history of Exeter. Its practical significance is narrow: the term appears in historical surveys of customary land law and in glossaries of obsolete legal vocabulary. Because Shortford was a purely local custom rather than a rule of the common law, it will not appear in general common law authorities or national statute rolls — researchers should look to records of borough custom, local surveys, and antiquarian legal commentary rather than standard case reporters or treatises.
The chain of authority is thin and self-referential. All three historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus trace the definition directly to Cowell's Interpreter (1607), making Cowell the primary (and effectively sole) named source. Researchers relying on dictionary definitions alone should be aware that no independent elaboration appears in the standard secondary literature covered by this corpus — the dictionaries are repeating one another through a single citation. Any deeper investigation of Shortford requires going directly to Cowell and to primary records of Exeter's borough customs.
No jurisdictional variation is meaningful here: Shortford was specific to Exeter and has no parallel in American law, equity practice, or modern landlord-tenant doctrine. Do not attempt to analogize it to modern foreclosure or distress remedies without considerable caution — the feudal tenure context is categorically different.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement, reproducing the same single-sentence definition word for word and citing only Cowell. This unanimity reflects the term's obscurity rather than settled authority: there is simply no competing commentary to synthesize. None of the three dictionaries elaborates on the procedural mechanics of Shortford — how notice was given, what formalities were required, or how the tenant's foreclosure was effectuated in practice. That gap is not supplied by the corpus and represents a genuine limit of the available secondary material.
Burrill's entry is notable primarily for what surrounds it: the Shortford definition appears in close physical proximity to entries for Latin and Law French oath formulas ("Si luy eyde Dieu et les saintz"), a reminder that Burrill was compiled in the tradition of comprehensive glossaries that swept in highly localized and obsolete terms alongside terms of general application. The collocation is alphabetical coincidence, not doctrinal connection.