Definition
An Old Scots legal phrase meaning "in warlike array" or armed and assembled in a manner characteristic of military preparation. The phrase appears in early Scottish criminal law records to describe conduct — typically the act of gathering or moving in a formation or manner associated with warfare or armed threat, as opposed to ordinary peaceable assembly. It functioned as an aggravating descriptor in criminal proceedings, marking the character of a group's conduct as militaristic and therefore more serious than common disorder or riot.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a narrow stratum of archaic Scots legal vocabulary that surfaces almost exclusively in pre-Union criminal trial records. Researchers encountering it will find it in early printed collections of Scottish criminal proceedings — most notably Pitcairn's Criminal Trials in Scotland — rather than in doctrinal treatises or institutional writers. It does not appear in later Scottish legal dictionaries because the conduct it described was absorbed into broader statutory and common law categories of riot, unlawful assembly, and armed breach of the peace long before the nineteenth century.
The phrase is a compound of Scots vernacular and legal Latin influence. Researchers should be alert to variant spellings across manuscript and printed sources: "bodin," "boudin," and "boddin" all appear, and "feir of weir" may be rendered "fear of war" or contracted in ways that obscure the phrase entirely. If searching digitized archives, broad wildcard searches are advisable.
The Burrill entry pairs this term immediately with BODMERIE (bottomry), a proximity that reflects alphabetical organization, not conceptual connection. Researchers should not infer any relationship between the two terms.
Because the phrase is essentially extinct as operative law, its research value is historical and documentary rather than doctrinal. It is most useful to historians of Scottish criminal law, scholars of late medieval and early modern public order offenses, and researchers tracing the evolution of Scots law on unlawful assembly and armed insurrection prior to the Acts of Union.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole dictionary entry of note, and it is minimal: the entry identifies the phrase as Old Scots, translates it as "in warlike array," and anchors it with a single source reference to Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, Part 1, page 8. Burrill does not elaborate on the legal consequences of being found to have acted bodin in feir of weir, nor does he situate the phrase within the broader structure of Scottish criminal law.
No other major historical legal dictionary — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Bell's Dictionary and Digest of the Law of Scotland — carries a dedicated entry for this phrase. Bell's coverage of Scots criminal law concepts is more extensive than most, but this phrase had already passed out of use by the time Bell was compiled. The absence across these dictionaries confirms that the phrase was archaic even by the early nineteenth century and was preserved primarily through Pitcairn's antiquarian editorial work rather than through living legal practice.
Researchers relying solely on dictionary sources will find little beyond Burrill. The Pitcairn reference is the authoritative primary anchor, and any substantive investigation must proceed from the trial records themselves.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusively Scottish in origin and application. It has no counterpart in English common law and never entered the legal vocabulary of jurisdictions derived from English legal tradition. It is relevant only to research concerning Scots law prior to the eighteenth century.