Definition
In old Scots law, a pledge or surety given by a seller of goods to the buyer, by which the seller guaranteed that the goods were the seller's own proper property and warranted the buyer's quiet possession and title in them. The borgh of hamhald was a formal undertaking: the seller stood as pledgor that the goods would be forthcoming as legitimately his own, and that the buyer would not be disturbed in holding them.
The term belongs to the early Scots legal tradition and has no modern statutory or common law successor. It is encountered exclusively in historical Scots legal texts and glossaries, most notably in Sir John Skene's *De Verborum Significatione* (1597), the principal source cited by all three historical dictionaries.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost entirely confined to early modern Scots legal manuscripts, glossaries, and commentaries from roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Skene's *De Verborum Significatione* is the anchor text; any research path should begin there. The term does not appear in English common law sources and will not be found in English Year Books or plea rolls.
The word *borgh* (also spelled *borg*, *borough* in some contexts, though unrelated to the municipal meaning) carries the general sense of pledge or surety across older Germanic and Scots usage, a point worth noting because the same root appears in the related term *borghbrech* (breach of pledge), which Burrill's entry usefully flags immediately following its definition of borgh of hamhald. Researchers working in early Scots property or commercial law should trace the borgh family of terms together rather than in isolation.
A key research trap: the word *borough* in English sources refers to a municipal or electoral unit and shares only etymological ancestry with *borgh* here. Do not conflate the two when searching historical indices or manuscript catalogues.
Because this is a term of the old Scots law predating the Act of Union (1707) and the subsequent harmonization of Scots and English commercial law, it will not appear in post-Union treatises except as a historical curiosity. Researchers using digital corpus searches should account for spelling variants: *borgh*, *borg*, *borch*, and *hamhald* may each appear in different manuscript hands.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's — give substantively identical definitions, each tracing directly to Skene. There is no meaningful divergence among them on substance. Burrill's entry adds the most contextual value by immediately connecting borgh of hamhald to the related term *borghbrech*, illuminating the broader Scots pledge-law vocabulary of which this term is a part.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is any discussion of how the borgh of hamhald functioned procedurally — that is, what remedies were available to a buyer if the surety was called upon, or how breach was adjudicated in early Scots courts. For that level of detail, Skene's original text, and potentially Balfour's *Practicks* (c. 1579), would need to be consulted directly. The dictionary entries preserve the term's definition but not its operational legal context.
The citation to Skene — rendered simply as "Skene" in all three dictionaries — refers to Sir John Skene, *De Verborum Significatione: The Exposition of the Termes and Difficill Wordes, Conteined in the Foure Buikes of Regiam Majestatem* (Edinburgh, 1597). This is a real and identifiable source.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs exclusively to the pre-Union Scots legal tradition. It has no English common law counterpart and no application in American, Canadian, or other common law jurisdictions. Modern Scots law does not use or recognize this term.