Wiktionary
n. (plural of assart English) vb. (en-third-person singular of: assart)
Usage examples of "assarts".
There were very ancient holdings along the rim which had once been assarts deep in woodland, and now had hewn out good arable land from old upland, and fenced their intakes.
The Long Forest, south and south-west of Shrewsbury, had survived unplundered longer than most of its kind, its assarts few and far between, its hunting coverts thick and wild, its open heaths home to all manner of creatures of earth and air.
Scattered among the surrounding woods there were a few small, new assarts cut out of the forest by enterprising younger sons.
Perhaps twenty cottars, woodsmen and hewers of laborious assarts from the forests lay in cover against more than a hundred Welsh, and every man of the twenty braced himself, and knew only too well how great a threat he faced.
He had been clerk to Brother Matthew, the cellarer, for four years, during which time fresh grants to the abbey had been flooding in richly, a new mill on the Tern, pastures, assarts, messuages in the town, glebes in the countryside, a fishery up-river, even a church or two, and there was no one who could match him at putting a finger on the slippery tenant or the field-lawyer, or the householder who had always three good stories to account for his inability to pay.
The comparative security offered by the presence of the canons' steward and servants had drawn others to settle close by, and there were now assarts being hewn out of the neglected woods by enterprising younger sons.
The comparative security offered by the presence of the canons’ steward and servants had drawn others to settle close by, and there were now assarts being hewn out of the neglected woods by enterprising younger sons.
Sometimes the path emerged for a short way into more open upland where the trees thinned and clearings of heath appeared, for all this stretch of country was the northern fringe of the Long Forest, where men had encroached with their little assarts and their legal or illegal cutting of timber and pasturing of pigs on acorns and beech-mast.