The Your Scottish Archives Glossary defines archaic words and phrases, mostly Scots law terminology, commonly found in documents and records in Scotland’s archives. If you think a word or phrase should be added to the glossary, or an existing entry could be defined better, please contact us at your@scottisharchives.org.uk.
You can also use the Dictionary of the Scots Language as a further resource at https://dsl.ac.uk/ for Scots words and phrases (including legal terminology).
To find a term within the glossary, click on the initial letter of the word you are looking for, then select the relevant syllable segment displayed below.
Example: to find the term “roup” select section “R” then sub-section “Ro”
or ‘thirds of benefices’. When the property of the medieval Church was available to acquisitive laymen after the Reformation, the king took over one-third of the revenues of all church benefices to make sure that something would still be left for the ministers of the reformed church ; appropriate parts of these revenues were assigned to the ministers, and any surplus was retained by the Crown. This was not really sufficient, which is why the Teind Court came into being.
an alternative name for astriction; it was the servitude whereby the proprietors and tenants of lands were bound to take their grain to one particular mill only for grinding, for which they would have to pay multures and sequels; the lands they held which were bound to the mill, were the mill’s sucken, and those bound to use the mill were termed its ‘in-sucken multurers’.
measure of cut grain, straw, reeds or other thatching material, consisting of two stooks, usually with twelve sheaves each but varying locally.