Definition
In old Scots law, to indemnify or make satisfaction to an injured party. The term describes the act of compensating or making amends — typically by a surety or obligor — to the person who suffered a wrong or loss. It appears in early Scottish legal instruments as a term of obligation, expressing the duty of one party to make the other whole.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially a relic of archaic Scots law and will appear only in pre-modern Scottish legal documents, instruments of suretyship, and early treatises on Scottish practice. Researchers working in Scottish legal history — particularly materials predating the 18th-century consolidation of Scots private law — may encounter it in bonds, cautionary obligations, or records of criminal compensation where a surety undertook to satisfy the wronged party on behalf of the principal offender.
The critical research trap is conceptual: the word looks unfamiliar enough that a reader might pass over it or misread it as a scribal error. Recognizing it as a term of art equivalent to "indemnify" or "make satisfaction" is essential to correctly interpreting the operative clause of any instrument in which it appears. Because modern Scots legal vocabulary abandoned the term entirely, it will not appear in contemporary legal sources, and its absence from English-law dictionaries reflects that it was never adopted south of the border.
Burrill preserves the term with a single illustrative fragment — "Sovertie to assith the partie" — which captures its functional context precisely: a surety binding itself to make satisfaction to the aggrieved party. This suretyship framing suggests the term belonged especially to the language of cautionary obligations and criminal compensation arrangements in early Scots practice, where the satisfaction of the victim (or their family, in homicide cases) was a formal legal objective distinct from public punishment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only major historical legal dictionary to record this term, and its entry is spare: a jurisdictional label (Scotch), a temporal qualifier (old), a plain-English gloss (to indemnify), and one illustrative phrase. No equivalent entry appears in Bouvier, Black's early editions, or Tomlin's Law Dictionary, confirming that the term was not received into the general common law lexicon.
Burrill's brevity is appropriate given the term's narrow application, but it leaves open the question of how broadly "assith" was used across different categories of Scots legal obligation — whether it extended beyond suretyship instruments to direct actions between debtor and creditor, or whether it was primarily tied to criminal compensation and satisfaction to crime victims. Early Scots legal sources, including Balfour's Practicks and Skene's De Verborum Significatione, would be the appropriate primary sources to resolve that question, as they document the vocabulary of pre-Union Scots law in greater depth than any English-language dictionary can.
Jurisdictional Note
Exclusively a term of Scots law. It has no currency in English common law or in the legal systems derived from it. Researchers working outside Scottish legal history have no occasion to encounter it.