Legal Definitions - de parco fracto

De parco fracto is a historical legal term from English common law. It refers to a specific type of legal writ, or formal court order, that was issued against an individual who forcibly broke into an animal pound or other designated enclosure to retrieve animals that had been legally seized and impounded. This act was known as "pound breach." Animals were typically impounded after being legally "distrained," meaning they were lawfully taken and held, often as security for an unpaid debt, rent, or as compensation for damage they had caused.

Here are some examples illustrating how de parco fracto would have applied:

• Imagine a medieval village where a farmer's pigs repeatedly escaped their pen and rooted through a neighbor's vegetable garden, causing significant damage. Following the local customs and laws, the aggrieved neighbor legally seized the pigs and placed them in the communal village pound, intending to hold them until the farmer paid compensation for the damage. However, the farmer, instead of negotiating or paying, broke the lock on the pound gate under the cover of darkness and took his pigs back. The neighbor could then seek a writ of de parco fracto against the farmer to address this illegal retrieval.

  This illustrates de parco fracto because the farmer forcibly interfered with animals that were lawfully impounded after being distrained for causing damage, bypassing the legal process for their release.

• Consider a tenant who owed several months of rent to their landlord. Under the laws of the time, the landlord had the right to distrain (seize) some of the tenant's livestock, such as sheep, and place them in an enclosure on the estate as security for the unpaid rent. If the tenant then forcibly entered this enclosure and removed the sheep without settling the debt or following proper legal channels, the landlord could have pursued a de parco fracto writ. This writ would have been the legal mechanism to address the tenant's unlawful act of breaking the impoundment.

  This example demonstrates de parco fracto as the tenant illegally retrieved their own animals from a lawful impoundment that was established due to an outstanding debt, thereby disrupting the landlord's legal right to distrain.