Definition
"Was" as a discrete legal term does not exist in modern law. The entry in Burrill's Law Dictionary under this heading is a fragment of the entry for WARREN — specifically a truncated note beginning mid-sentence that describes a warren as "a place protected by special privilege, or the use of which is prohibited to all but certain individuals." The fragment preserves Burrill's reference to Blackstone (2 Bl. Com. 39) and his description of a warren as a franchise granting the exclusive right to kill certain game within a defined territory.
The legal content here belongs entirely to the entry for WARREN, not to the word "was."
Why It Matters in Research
This entry exists as a digitization or pagination artifact. When Law Mind corpus researchers encounter "WAS" as a headword in Burrill, they are looking at a mid-sentence continuation from the preceding page, not a standalone legal term. The substantive content — franchise rights, warren privileges, Blackstone's treatment of game law — should be retrieved and read under WARREN.
Researchers working with digitized historical legal dictionaries frequently encounter this problem: page breaks, binding cuts, and OCR errors cause fragments of longer entries to surface as apparent headwords. The presence of a bracketed note marker "[d.]" in the source text confirms this is a sub-note within a larger entry, not a root definition.
No legal research task requires treating "was" as a term of art. If a search of the Law Mind corpus returns this entry, redirect to WARREN.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry, read in full context, describes the warren as both a physical place (ground set apart for breeding hares and rabbits) and a legal franchise (the exclusive power of killing certain game within one's warren). These two dimensions track Blackstone's distinction between a free warren as a franchise and the common understanding of a warren as a physical enclosure. The fragment preserved here captures Burrill's gloss on the franchise character of the right — that it was a "sole and exclusive power" contingent on the holder preventing others from exercising the same privilege within the territory.
Historical dictionaries uniformly treat WARREN as the operative term. No legal dictionary of the 18th or 19th century recognizes "was" as a legal term of art.