A person who wrongfully possesses or withholds property; a variant of deforceor.
From deforce + -iant (agent suffix from French -iant). This is an extremely rare variant form of deforceor, appearing only occasionally in medieval legal documents.
This is perhaps the most obscure spelling variant in English law—'deforciant' appears in a few 13th-century documents but was quickly superseded by 'deforceor' and 'deforcer,' suggesting linguistic standardization in legal terminology.
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