Definition
In Scots law, to bind land (and its possessors) to a particular mill, obligating the occupants to bring grain grown on that land to a specified mill for grinding. Lands subject to this obligation are described as "astricted to" the mill in question. The term operates in the context of thirlage, the feudal servitude system under which landowners or tenants owed compulsory custom to a designated mill. To astrict land was to create or acknowledge that servitude, typically by feudal grant or long-established usage.
More broadly, and outside the specific thirlage context, astrict can mean simply to bind, constrain, or restrict — a sense that appears in general legal writing but carries no distinct technical weight outside Scotland.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To bind, constrain, or restrict; to estop; to restrict the tenure of.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To bind up, confine, constrict, or contract; to bind or constrain; to restrict to certain modes of thought or action; to restrict the tenure of lands.
The common English meaning — general binding or constraining — is broader and more abstract than the legal usage. In legal sources, astrict nearly always appears in the narrow technical context of Scots thirlage law, referring specifically to the obligation to grind at a designated mill. A researcher encountering the word in a philosophical or medical text should not import that broader sense into a legal document, and vice versa.
Common Confusion
Astrict is sometimes confused with restrict or constrict in secondary writing about Scots law, where authors unfamiliar with the term paraphrase it in generic language and lose its specific feudal-servitude meaning. More importantly, astrict must be distinguished from the related concepts it implies: thirlage (the servitude itself), multures (the toll paid for grinding), and sequels (subsidiary payments). To say land is astricted tells you the obligation exists; it does not by itself define the rate of multures owed or the scope of grain covered. These are separate legal questions requiring separate inquiry.
Why It Matters in Research
Astrict is an almost exclusively Scots law term. Researchers will encounter it in pre-Union Scottish records, feudal charters, institutional writers such as Erskine and Bell, and nineteenth-century Scottish case law dealing with the survival or abolition of thirlage obligations. It does not appear in English common law sources in any technical sense.
The practical research trap is chronological: thirlage as a legal institution was substantially abolished in Scotland by the Thirlage Act 1799, and subsequent references to astricted lands in conveyancing or agricultural records are often historical recitals rather than live obligations. A researcher examining an early nineteenth-century Scottish title deed must determine whether an astriction clause describes a continuing servitude or a superseded one.
The term also signals a cluster of related vocabulary. Whenever astrict appears, multures, insucken, outsucken, and sequels are likely nearby. Missing these companion terms will produce an incomplete picture of the obligation being described.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in close agreement on the core meaning. Black's (both editions), Bouvier, and Burrill all define the term as assigning or binding land to a particular mill in Scots law. Burrill adds the most useful gloss, noting that lands are astricted "when the possessor is bound to carry the grain of the growth of the land to be ground at such mill" — a formulation that captures both the personal obligation on the possessor and the connection to the land itself. Burrill also traces the Latin root (astrictus, bound), which is accurate and confirms the term's civil law lineage, though it arrived in Scots law through feudal practice rather than Roman doctrine directly.
Bouvier adds the citations to Bell's Dictionary and Erskine's Institutes that remain the authoritative institutional sources. Erskine's Institutes Book 2, Title 9 is the canonical treatment of thirlage and astriction in classical Scots law scholarship.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the practical dissolution of astriction as a live legal mechanism after 1799. They present the term in its operational form without flagging its obsolescence, which is a meaningful gap for researchers working with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish materials.
Jurisdictional Note
Astrict is a term of Scots law with no equivalent legal meaning in English common law or American jurisprudence. Researchers working in English or American sources who encounter the term are almost certainly reading a Scots law authority, a comparative legal text, or a mistaken borrowing. The institution of thirlage to which astriction belongs was formally curtailed by Scottish legislation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.