disafforest
/ˌdɪsəˈfɒrɪst
/verb [with object]
1 another term for deforest.They grazed cattle on disafforested surfaces, building small stone huts to accommodate themselves, as well as the cattle they grazed....
- The sum of £42,000 was expended, and the farm is let at a rental of £4,000; the annual product of the trees, etc., before the ground was disafforested, was about £500.
- ‘I was shown the spot where, until the disafforesting, it had long lain prostrate,’ says J R. Akerman in A View of the Ancient Limits of the Forest of Wychwood, Archaeologia l858.
2 English Law, historical Reduce (a district) from the legal status of forest to that of ordinary land: in 1878 what remained of the forest of Essex was disafforested...
- Its clauses provided the framework of forest law throughout the 13th cent., but only in the 14th cent., when large areas were disafforested, did the political issue subside.
- Hence, the demand to disafforest in chapter 47 of the Magna Carta.
- Tendring hundred had been disafforested by king Stephen before the grant of John mentioned above.
Derivatives
disafforestation
- When the disafforestation took place, the local people lost any rights they had in the Forest, even the right to walk.
- These forests were largely unaffected by the disafforestations made by Richard I and John, and the communities within them suffered from John's increasingly rigorous imposition of forest law.
- Hence it was recommended that disafforestation must be allowed after obtaining legal sanction of the commission to check the depletion and degradation of forest areas.
disafforestment
- And the perambulation that has already been made and ridden by view of good men according to the form of the said charter of the forest shall stand and at the same time shall be carried out through prompt disafforestment according to the bounds determined by the perambulators, so that the community may at once be seised of them.
- By the provisions of this charter surveys or perambulations of the royal forests were to be made to ascertain how much land had been improperly enclosed by the Crown, and steps taken for the disafforestment of the portions wrongfully taken in.
- The benefit of the disafforestment existed only for the owner of the lands.
Origin
Late Middle English (in sense 2): from Anglo-Latin disafforestare.