Definition
In Scots law and some English regional usage, a hag is a defined section or compartment of a coppice wood or timber stand set aside for periodic cutting. The proprietor would harvest timber from a hag on a rotating schedule — one compartment cut each year — allowing other sections to regenerate before the next cycle. The term describes both the physical division of the woodland and the right or practice of taking wood from it systematically.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To cut or erode, as a hag (a hollow worn into moorland); also used as a noun for such a hollow or boggy depression in upland terrain.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A witch, sorceress, or enchantress; an ugly old woman; a she-monster. Also a hagfish (Myxine glutinosa), an eel-like marine creature.
The gap here is substantial and easily missed. Neither the supernatural nor the zoological meaning has any connection to the legal and agrarian sense. Researchers encountering hag in a conveyance, estate record, or treatise on Scots property law should not assume they are reading an archaic insult or a biological curiosity. The Wiktionary definition of cutting or eroding comes closest to the legal sense but describes process rather than the formal property unit the law recognized.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Scots land records, English manorial documents, or historical conveyancing materials from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries may encounter hag as a term of art in descriptions of woodland property. Misreading it — or failing to recognize it at all — can distort an understanding of what was being conveyed, leased, or assessed.
Several traps exist in historical sources. First, the word appears inconsistently: hag, hagg, and haig are all attested spellings, and indexing in manuscript collections may not capture all variants. Second, because the term is geographically concentrated (Scots law and northern English practice), a researcher trained on English common law sources may not recognize it without regional context. Third, the ecological logic of the hag system — compartmentalized coppicing on a rotation — matters to understanding what a hag actually was worth. A hag that had just been cut had different present value than one standing ready for harvest. Conveyances that mention a hag without specifying its stage in the rotation are describing something the parties likely understood by custom but that requires contextual reconstruction today.
Bouvier cites Erskine's Principles of the Law of Scotland, which remains a foundational source for Scots property concepts of this period. Researchers should consult Erskine directly for the fuller doctrinal context. The hag connects to broader concepts of woodland tenure, rights of estovers (taking wood from land), and the management of timber as a separable property interest from the land itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is minimal — a single sentence with a citation to Erskine — but it is precise. The definition (a division of a coppice cut annually by the proprietor) captures the essential meaning accurately. Bouvier does not elaborate on the rotation system, the legal incidents of ownership, or how a hag might be described or bounded in a deed, which limits its utility for researchers who need more than identification.
No entry for hag appears in standard English common law dictionaries such as Jacob's Law Dictionary or Tomlin's Law Dictionary in this specific agrarian sense, which underscores the term's regional and Scots character. Its absence from those sources is itself information: finding hag in a document is a strong signal that Scots law or northern English customary practice governs the instrument, not the general common law of England.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is primarily a feature of Scots law and northern English regional practice. It carries no established meaning in American law and would not appear as a legal term of art in United States sources. Researchers working on colonial American land records who encounter the word are almost certainly dealing with immigrant Scots or northern English practitioners importing the terminology.