An assart is a patch of woodland grubbed out for crops; to assart is to do the grubbing — noun and verb for the same act, sitting one keystroke apart, so the word names both the work and what the work leaves behind. It comes out of English forest law, where clearing the king’s woods without licence was an offence with its own paperwork, and it survives in field names, quietly marking where someone once won a harvest off the trees.