Definition
Fire raising is a criminal offense in Scots law consisting of the willful setting fire to property. Historically defined to cover buildings, growing or stored grain, growing timber, and coal workings (coalheughs), the offense is the Scottish equivalent of arson as understood in English and American law.
Modern Scots law distinguishes between two grades of the offense:
1. WILFUL FIRE RAISING: The deliberate and intentional setting fire to property. Under Scots common law, and later codified in the Criminal Law (Consolidation) (Scotland) Act 1995, willful fire raising applies to any property and requires proof of intent to set the fire.
2. CULPABLE AND RECKLESS FIRE RAISING: The reckless (though not necessarily intentional) setting fire to property, where the accused was indifferent to the risk of fire spreading or causing damage. This form does not require proof of intent to burn the specific property damaged.
Common Confusion
Fire raising and arson are functionally parallel offenses — both concern the deliberate or reckless destruction of property by fire — but they are not interchangeable in legal research. Arson is the term of art in English, American, and most common law jurisdictions. Fire raising is the term native to Scots law and appears almost exclusively in Scottish sources, treatises, and case law. Researchers using English or American secondary sources will rarely encounter fire raising as a live legal term; conversely, researchers working in Scottish legal materials will rarely encounter arson as the operative charge. The distinction matters for corpus research: searching for arson in Scottish sources may miss the primary vocabulary of the offense, and vice versa.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is terminological displacement. A researcher surveying arson law who confines searches to the word "arson" will systematically miss Scottish authorities, which use fire raising throughout. Older Scottish treatises — Erskine, Hume, and Alison — discuss the offense under this heading exclusively, and understanding the historical contours of the offense in those works requires engaging with fire raising as the governing term.
The offense has evolved substantially within Scots law. The historical formulation listed in Erskine (buildings, growing cereals, growing wood, coalheughs) reflected an agrarian and industrial property landscape. Modern Scots law has broadened the scope to cover any property and has separated willful from reckless fire raising more formally than historical sources suggest. Researchers relying solely on Erskine or Bouvier's summary of Erskine will encounter an incomplete and dated picture.
The coalheugh (coal working or mine) reference in Bouvier is an archaic property category that reflects the importance of the coal industry in historical Scottish law and economy. It has no modern equivalent as a separately enumerated category.
For researchers tracing the influence of Scots law on American law, fire raising is largely a dead end: American jurisdictions adopted arson from English common law, not from Scottish sources, and the Scottish doctrinal development of willful versus reckless fire raising did not carry over in any systematic way. However, comparative criminal law researchers examining the recklessness dimension of property-by-fire offenses will find the Scots law distinction between willful and culpable fire raising analytically useful, since many American arson statutes have grappled with the same intent/recklessness boundary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is brief and derivative, pointing the reader immediately to Erskine's Principles and then to the entry for Arson. This accurately reflects Bouvier's approach to distinctly Scottish legal terms: he acknowledges them as foreign law without attempting a full doctrinal treatment. The cross-reference to Arson signals that Bouvier regarded fire raising as the functional Scottish equivalent rather than a substantively distinct offense.
What Bouvier's summary omits is meaningful. It captures the historical property categories but says nothing about the intent requirements, the distinction between willful and reckless fire raising, or the procedural and evidentiary dimensions that Scottish courts developed over time. Erskine's Principles (the cited source) treats the offense as requiring willful act, but later Scottish authorities — particularly Hume's Commentaries on the Law of Scotland Respecting Crimes — develop the doctrine more fully, including discussion of what circumstances establish the willfulness of the act. Neither Hume nor Alison's Principles and Practice of the Criminal Law of Scotland appears in Bouvier's entry, and researchers should treat those works as essential primary references for historical Scots law on this offense.
No other historical dictionary in the standard Law Mind shelf addresses fire raising as an independent entry; it is treated, when mentioned at all, as a Scottish variant of arson.
Jurisdictional Note
Fire raising as a legal term is specific to Scots law. In England and Wales, the comparable offense is arson under the Criminal Damage Act 1971. In the United States, arson is universal. Researchers working in any non-Scottish jurisdiction should treat fire raising as a historical or comparative reference point rather than operative law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Arson | Scottish Criminal Law