Definition
An archaic term from old Scots law referring to a hand-axe. The word appears in historical legal texts concerned with weapons, their regulation, or their use in the context of criminal offenses or property. It has no active meaning in modern law.
Why It Matters in Research
GYSARUM is a term a researcher will encounter only in medieval or early modern Scots legal sources and the historical dictionaries that index them. Its practical relevance is narrow: the term surfaces when tracing early Scottish criminal law, regulations governing weapons, or glossaries of obsolete Scots legal vocabulary. Researchers working in this space should be aware that Burrill's entry conflates two distinct headwords — GYSARUM and GYVU — running them together as a single entry, which can create momentary confusion about which term is being defined. The hand-axe definition belongs exclusively to GYSARUM; the Jew definition belongs to GYVU and its variants (Gyu, Gieu, Geu). These are unrelated terms that share only typographic proximity in Burrill's text.
Beyond that disambiguation, GYSARUM has no documented evolution in legal meaning, no jurisdictional variation outside its Scots origin, and no meaningful presence in any body of law post-medieval period. A researcher who encounters it in a primary source is almost certainly working with a passage touching on weaponry, violence, or forfeiture in early Scots proceedings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this term, and its treatment is minimal: a three-word definition ("a hand-axe") attributed to Skene's De Verborum Significatione, the sixteenth-century Scots law glossary compiled by Sir John Skene. Skene's work remains the authoritative primary source for obsolete Scots legal vocabulary of this period, and Burrill's entry does no more than transmit Skene's definition without elaboration or commentary.
No other standard historical legal dictionary — not Jacob's Law Dictionary, not Tomlin's, not Black's in its early editions — appears to carry an independent entry for GYSARUM, which underscores both the term's obscurity and its specifically Scots provenance. Researchers requiring fuller context for the term as it appears in original sources should go directly to Skene rather than rely on the secondary transmission through Burrill.