Definition
In old Scotch law, a noxious weed or harmful herb found growing among grain crops. The term appears in historical Scottish legal texts in the context of agricultural nuisance or land obligation disputes, where the presence of damaging plants among cultivated crops was a recognized legal concern. Guld has no meaningful survival in modern legal usage and is encountered only in historical Scots law sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not listed as a current English word; effectively obsolete.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A flower. See Gold. [Obs.] Chaucer."
The historical common meaning points toward a flowering plant — likely the corn marigold (Chrysanthemum segetum), a yellow-flowered weed notorious for invading grain fields in medieval Scotland. The legal meaning is not a contradiction of the common meaning but a narrowing of it: where ordinary usage named the plant by its appearance, the legal usage addressed it by its agricultural harm. A researcher reading the term in a legal instrument should not import poetic or decorative connotations; in legal context, guld is defined by its noxious character, not its flower.
Why It Matters in Research
Guld is the kind of highly localized historical term that appears without explanation in old Scots law records and can halt a researcher who encounters it cold. Its significance in the corpus is narrow but specific: it belongs to the body of agricultural and rural law in medieval and early modern Scotland, touching on obligations of tenants and landholders to maintain arable land free from weeds that damaged neighboring crops or reduced yields.
Researchers working in pre-Union Scottish legal materials — burgh records, feu charters, or baronial court records — may encounter guld in clauses imposing duties to clear land or in proceedings against tenants for permitting the spread of noxious plants. It should be read alongside related Scots agrarian law terms rather than mapped onto English common law categories.
The term has no presence in English law and no modern statutory survival. Any encounter with guld outside of historical Scots law materials should be treated with caution as a possible transcription error or archaic borrowing.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary anglophone legal dictionary source to note guld, and its entry is brief: it identifies the term as Scots, defines it as a noxious herb growing among corn, and cites Skene's De Verborum Significatione — Sir John Skene's late sixteenth-century glossary of Scots legal terms, which remains a foundational reference for archaic Scots law vocabulary. Burrill's entry is useful precisely because it routes the researcher to Skene, the authoritative primary source for this class of term.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the anglophone tradition — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Jacob's — appear to carry this term, which reflects its geographic and temporal specificity. Researchers who rely solely on English-tradition dictionaries will find nothing; guld requires Scots-specific sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Guld is exclusive to historical Scots law. It has no counterpart in English common law and does not appear in the legal vocabulary of any other jurisdiction. Research use is confined to pre-modern Scottish legal materials.