Definition
An archaic term from Scots law denoting the offense of violently entering a person's dwelling without lawful authority and assaulting him there. The term captures two overlapping wrongs: the violation of the home's sanctity (the intrusion itself) and the physical assault committed within it. In broader usage, it was also applied to the crime of housebreaking or burglary generally.
Hamesecken is an alternative spelling of hamesucken, the more commonly encountered form in Scots legal literature. The two spellings are interchangeable; researchers should treat them as the same term.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Listed only as an alternative form of hamesucken. No independent common meaning.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not attested.
This term has no life outside legal and historical Scots usage. The COMMON LANGUAGE section does not apply.
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Common Confusion
HAMESECKEN vs. HAMESUCKEN: These are variant spellings of the same offense, not distinct crimes. Historical sources and digitized legal databases may index them separately. A researcher who finds one and not the other has likely missed half the available material. Search for both forms.
HAMESECKEN vs. BURGLARY: Black's equates hamesecken with housebreaking or burglary, but the correspondence is imprecise. The Scots offense emphasizes the assault of the occupant within the home as the core wrong; English burglary historically focused on the breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony, with or without any assault. The two offenses share a common concern for domestic security but are not interchangeable concepts.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is primarily a historical research term with very limited practical application in modern law. Researchers will encounter it in three contexts:
First, in Scots legal history. Hamesecken appears in foundational Scots institutional writings and older criminal law sources. Because Scots law developed along a distinct path from English common law, researchers should not assume that English authorities on burglary or housebreaking translate cleanly into the Scots context.
Second, in comparative criminal law. When tracing the historical development of home-protection offenses across jurisdictions, hamesecken serves as a marker of how early legal systems conceptualized the home as a protected space. Its dual character — combining trespass and assault — is analytically distinct from the English tradition and worth noting in comparative work.
Third, in corpus navigation. The spelling variation (hamesecken / hamesucken) is a genuine research trap. Older digitized texts may use either form, or both, without cross-referencing. Run searches on both spellings. Additionally, Blackstone's citation at 4 Bl. Comm. 223 places the term in an English comparative frame, which may lead researchers into English sources that treat the offense as analogous to burglary — useful for context, but not authoritative on the Scots offense itself.
The term does not appear in modern statutory codes and is not a live charge in contemporary criminal practice in Scotland or elsewhere.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary reproduce identical entries, word for word, which indicates that no new scholarship or doctrinal development prompted revision between editions. The definition is brief and consistent: violent unlicensed entry into a dwelling, combined with seeking out and assaulting the occupant there. Both editions cite Skene's De Verborum Significatione and Forbes's Institutes of the Law of Scotland (2 Forb. Inst. 139) as Scots authorities, and Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Comm. 223) for the housebreaking/burglary equivalence.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any treatment of the offense's elements as a matter of Scots criminal procedure, its penalties, or how Scottish courts distinguished it from lesser trespassing offenses. The definitions function as identification markers rather than analytical guides. Researchers needing doctrinal depth will need to go directly to the institutional Scots sources cited — Skene and Forbes — rather than relying on Black's summary.
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Jurisdictional Note
Hamesecken is a Scots law term with no direct equivalent in English common law doctrine, though Blackstone drew a functional comparison to housebreaking and burglary. It has no recognized application in American law. Researchers working in U.S. jurisdictions should treat this as a historical comparative reference only.
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