Definition
A small vessel or boat. The term appears in old Scots law sources and is occasionally rendered in the alternative form "fercost." Its use is confined to historical legal contexts, principally in matters touching on maritime activity, customs, tolls, or harbor rights as regulated under early Scottish law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering fercosta will almost exclusively find it in pre-modern Scots law materials. The term is not operative in any modern legal system and carries no contemporary statutory or common law significance. Its research value is therefore antiquarian and definitional: knowing what vessel type was meant affects the interpretation of historical grants, toll schedules, port regulations, or maritime obligations in which the term appears.
The alternate spelling "fercost" is the more Scotticized form and is the variant most likely to appear in archival manuscript sources. Researchers using digitized historical corpora should search both spellings. The Italian derivation flagged by Burrill suggests the term entered Scots legal vocabulary through mercantile or civil law channels — a pattern consistent with Scotland's historical trading connections and the influence of Continental legal learning on Scots private law. This linguistic pathway means the term may surface in contexts shaped by ius commune alongside purely domestic Scots customary materials.
The primary cited authority across all three source dictionaries is Skene's De Verborum Significatione, a sixteenth-century Scots legal glossary compiled by Sir John Skene. Any researcher seeking to pin down the precise legal context in which fercosta was used should go directly to Skene rather than rely on the secondary summaries in Black's or Burrill. The historical dictionaries provide no further elaboration on what legal consequences, duties, or privileges attached to this vessel type — only that it existed as a recognized category in Scots legal vocabulary.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in close agreement: fercosta denotes a small vessel or boat, derives from Italian, and is recorded in old Scots law under the variant fercost. The entries in Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's are essentially co-extensive, with Burrill adding the Italian derivation and the citation to Skene's full title, De Verborum Significatione. No source offers a definition of the vessel's size, construction, or use beyond the generic description "small vessel or boat." None of the dictionaries attempts to distinguish fercosta from other small vessel types appearing in historical Scots maritime or commercial law. Researchers should treat these entries as threshold identifications only — they confirm what the word means but provide no interpretive content about how the category functioned legally.
The adjacency of the entry for FERDELLA TERRAE in Black's (a unit of land measurement) is incidental to alphabetical arrangement and carries no substantive connection to fercosta.
Jurisdictional Note
Fercosta is a term of old Scots law with no known parallel usage in English common law sources. Researchers working in English maritime or admiralty materials are unlikely to encounter it. Its relevance is confined to Scottish historical legal research.