A free warren—often simply warren—is a type of franchise or privilege conveyed by a sovereign in medieval England to an English subject, promising to hold them harmless for killing game of certain species within a stipulated area, usually a wood or small forest.
Thus, even though the warrant ultimately derived from the sovereign, the only statutes applied to poachers in a warren were the common-law crimes of theft and trespass.
However, as the franchise defined both a set of species and a geographic extent, the natural semantic extensions arose, namely for the individual animals as a group, or for the land they inhabited.
All of the terms warrant, warrantor, and warranty are used in Henry II of England's Assize of the Forest (a.k.a.
This definition was flexible, however, depending on whether the animal was thought to provide good sport, as wolves, foxes, badgers, or bears.
In practice, vermin could only be killed on the commons or waste, since none but the grantee was permitted to have instruments of the hunt within the warren.
[10] Sometimes domestic swine are mistakenly thought to be beasts of warren, due the right of pannage.