Definition
In old Scots law, a bipennis was a specific type of bladed weapon — a double-headed axe or polearm. The term appears in early Scottish criminal trial records as a named weapon in the context of charges involving armed assault, slaughter, or riot, where the precise instrument of violence carried legal significance for the nature and severity of the charge.
The Scots law usage encompasses several related weapons of the polearm and axe family, including the halbert (a combined spear and axe on a long staff), the pole-ax, and the Jeddart staff — a form of staff weapon associated with the border town of Jedburgh and used by both soldiers and common men in late medieval and early modern Scotland.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An axe with an edge or blade on each side of the handle.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An ax with an edge or blade on each side of the handle.
The common meaning and the legal meaning are close but not identical. In ordinary usage, bipennis describes the physical form of the weapon — its double-bladed construction. In old Scots law, the term functioned as a category within pleading and indictment, grouping a family of polearm and axe-type weapons relevant to criminal charges. The legal usage was therefore broader than the strict physical description, and a researcher should not assume that every appearance of bipennis in a criminal trial record refers only to a symmetrical double-bladed axe rather than to a halbert or staff weapon of similar character.
Why It Matters in Research
This term has no life in modern law. Its research value is entirely historical and confined to Scottish criminal records from the medieval and early modern periods, principally the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Researchers working in Scottish criminal trial records — particularly Pitcairn's Criminal Trials in Scotland — will encounter bipennis as a weapon named in indictments. In that context, the specific weapon named was not merely descriptive color; it was sometimes legally material to whether a charge involved a particular aggravated form of violence or fell under statutes or customs governing armed men or the carrying of certain weapons.
The grouping of bipennis with halbert and Jeddart staff in Burrill reflects how Scots law sources used the term loosely across a family of polearm-type weapons rather than as a precise technical specification. A researcher should not attempt to distinguish these weapons with modern precision when reading old indictments — the records themselves were not always consistent in applying the terms.
Outside Scottish criminal history, the term does not appear in English common law sources and has no counterpart in civil law systems. It will not appear in equity records, property documents, or any civil pleading context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the only historical law dictionary to carry this entry, which itself signals the term's narrow jurisdictional and temporal range. Burrill derives his definition directly from Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, part 2, page 20, which remains the primary documentary source for the term's legal usage. No other standard historical law dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier, not Jacob — carries bipennis, confirming it as a term of purely Scottish antiquarian interest by the time English-language legal dictionaries were consolidated in the nineteenth century.
Burrill's grouping of bipennis with the Jeddart staff is historically apt: the Jeddart staff was a recognized weapon in Scottish border culture and appears repeatedly in Scottish criminal records of the sixteenth century alongside halberts and axes under the general heading of invasive weapons. Spelman's work, referenced in the adjacent Burrill entry on Birlaws, provides useful parallel context for the kind of Scots-Latin legal vocabulary in which bipennis appears.
No historical law dictionary attempts a formal legal definition in the modern sense. The entries treat bipennis as a vocabulary gloss — a translation aid for readers encountering the Latin term in archival sources — rather than as a term carrying doctrinal content.
Jurisdictional Note
Bipennis as a legal term is confined to old Scots law. It has no counterpart in English common law and does not appear in continental European legal sources in a comparable legal context, despite the Latin term's classical origins.