Assart

Assart (pronounced ess-sart)

(1) In English law, as an intransitive verb, the act of grubbing up trees or bushes to convert forest into arable land; a variant was the less common essart, directly from the Old French).

(2) In English law, as a noun, a piece of once forested land cleared for use in agriculture (obsolete).

Pre 1000: From the Middle French essarter, from the Old French essart, from essarter (to “grub up” or clear land), from the Late Latin exartum, probably from the Vulgar Latin exsartum, neuter of exsartus, past participle of exsarire (to weed out), the construct being ex- (out) + sarire (to hoe, weed).  It was akin to the Old High German sarf (sharp), the Latin sarpere (to prune), the Ancient Greek harpagē (hook, rake) and the Sanskrit sṛṇī (sickle).  Assart is a noun & verb and assarted & assarting are verbs; the noun plural is assarts.

The companion noun was the now archaic thwaite, from the Middle English thwait, from the Old Norse þveit (paddock).  Related forms included the Old Norse þveita (to hurl (and linked to the later English “whittle”)), the Danish døjt (1⁄160 of the gulden (and in dialectal use: “a small coin”)), the German Deut and the Dutch duit.  It was cognate with the Old English þwītan (to thwite; cut; cut off) and was a doublet of doit (the small Dutch coin) and possibly of twat (slang for both “a stupid person” and “the vulva or vagina”).  A thwaite was also a piece of assarted forest land, the only difference being it could be used for purpose of habitation as well as agriculture or habitation but the distinction was never enforced in law and the two words co-existed, apparently without ill-effect.

Land clearance

Assart: Lindsay Lohan in Prussian blue bikini, Florianópolis, Brazil, April 2013.

Although an ancient practice, the legal mechanism of the assart was a creation of feudal law and referred to to the act of clearing forested land for the purpose of converting it into arable land or pasture, something of some significance in medieval England.  Assarting was often regulated by feudal law because forested land was valuable (both the land value and resources such as water, timber and wild game) and typically the property of the crown or a lord and the unauthorized clearing (assarting) of forest land was prohibited, offenders subject to legal sanction.  Once approval was granted, the parcel of land assarted was described as “an assart” (except in northern England where the common law term was “a riding”) and in some instances, those granted permission to assart might be required to pay an "assart rent" as a form of tax or fee for the use of the newly cleared land, a legal concept not dissimilar to the modern RRT (resource rental tax) system used in some jurisdictions to generate revenue from those exploiting an area of land or sea for purposes of resource extraction.  In medieval England, clearances happened usually on common land which was then put to private use, the “assart rents” paid to the Crown for the land assarted.  Assarting (though usually without the elaborate legal structures) has been practiced since the last days of the hunter-gatherer societies towards the end of the pre-historic era and was a significant practice during the Middle Ages as it played a role in agricultural expansion and the transformation of the landscape from wild forest to cultivated land, something which enabled an increase in the production of food which in turn made sustainable larger populations, something which of course led to the need further to assart.

Like any form of government action in which a government transfers a right in land held in common (although the term “common land” is a little misleading) by way of a leasehold or freehold title, there were often “special deals” and the better connected one was, the more special (in terms of area, frequency of grant, exchange of consideration etc) they were likely to be, local Lords and churches especially favoured.  The land cleared was usually common land but after assarting, the space became privately used, either by the individual family who would remove the wooded coverage except to the extent hedges were retained to create individual paddocks or by cooperatives (groups of geographically close families or even whole villages) which would divide the space on some agreed basis.  The monasteries (which once littered the country) were also players, needing agricultural activities both to secure the necessary food supplies and to provide surpluses which could be cash crops or used in the then prevalent barter economy.  The thousand-year trend, in most parts of the world settled or colonised by Europeans, has been that assartment has tended to increase the acreage of cleared land suitable for agriculture and reduce the size of forests.  However, one aberration happened during the fourteenth century when the Black Death pandemic radically depopulated the countryside and many assarted areas reverted to woodland.