Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning to catch, seize, or obtain. In historical legal usage, "hap" denoted the act of physically taking or securing something — most commonly rent, a deed, or another legal instrument — often with the implication that the first party to lay hands on the item would thereby acquire a right or advantage. The term appears in older common law contexts where physical possession was determinative of legal entitlement.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person's lot, luck, fortune, or fate; also, a stroke of good or bad luck, an unexpected or fortuitous occurrence or happening.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To clothe or wrap. "The surgeon happed her up carefully."
The ordinary English senses of "hap" — luck, chance, or wrapping — have no connection to the legal meaning. In law, "hap" was an active verb of physical seizure or capture, not a noun of fortune. A researcher encountering the term in a legal text should resist the temptation to read it as referring to chance or happenstance; the legal usage is transactional and possessory, not aleatory.
Common Confusion
The proximity of "hap" to common English words built on the same root — "happen," "happenstance," "perhaps," "mishap" — can mislead readers into treating the legal term as an allusion to chance or contingency. In legal instruments and treatises, it is not. When Finch writes "he that can first hap it, shall enjoy out the term," the meaning is that the first party to physically seize or secure the item acquires the benefit — a rule grounded in possession, not luck. Separately, Rapalje & Lawrence list adjacent entries for "happen to die" and "happening" as they appear in wills, which are genuine contingency terms. These are distinct concepts; their proximity in the same dictionary entry can create false linkage.
Why It Matters in Research
HAP is a dead term in modern practice but surfaces in transcribed historical documents, early common law treatises, and antique deed and lease instruments. Researchers working with materials from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries — particularly English common law sources, colonial American instruments, or South Carolina equity records — may encounter it without any modern gloss.
Several navigational points:
First, the corpus entry in Rapalje & Lawrence appends "HAPPEN TO DIE" and "HAPPENING" as neighboring entries tied to will construction cases. These are conceptually unrelated to "hap" as a possessory term. A researcher following cross-references should be alert to this editorial proximity, which reflects alphabetical arrangement rather than substantive connection.
Second, Burrill provides the most useful working definition, including the key quotation from Finch's Law: "He that can first hap it, shall enjoy out the term." This establishes that "hap" in leasehold and rent contexts operated as a first-possession rule — whoever seized the rent or instrument first held the advantage. This has implications for understanding historical disputes over rent collection and instrument priority that would otherwise read as opaque.
Third, the phrase "hap the deed-poll" (appearing in Black's and Bouvier's) signals that the term was used in conveyancing contexts. A deed-poll is a deed executed by one party only; "happing" it meant physically securing or taking possession of the executed instrument. In historical practice, delivery and physical possession of a deed were legally significant acts, and "happing" the deed was not merely descriptive but potentially operative.
Fourth, researchers working with digitized or transcribed historical sources should be aware that "hap" may be misread, mistranscribed, or silently modernized. OCR errors on archaic typefaces frequently garble short Law French terms.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries agree on the core definition: "to catch." Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's offer the same brief formulation, attributing usage to "Tech. Dict." (Cowell's Interpreter). Rapalje & Lawrence add Cowell's authority explicitly and append the neighboring will-construction entries. Burrill provides the richest treatment, adding the secondary senses of "to snatch," "to get, gain or obtain," and "to get by chance," as well as the Finch quotation and a cross-reference to "Happer" — a related agent noun that does not appear in the other dictionaries and may reward separate investigation.
The common-usage sense of "hap" as luck or fortune does not appear in any of the legal sources, which is itself informative: the legal profession treated the word as a term of art in possession and not as a borrowing from the vernacular sense of chance. Bouvier's transcribes "deed-poll" as "deep-poll," an apparent copying error that illustrates the dangers of relying on any single secondary source for archaic terms.
No source dictionary provides case law support for the term's application; the authorities cited are Cowell and Finch, both treatise-level sources. This suggests "hap" was a technical term of art absorbed from Law French practice rather than a term with a developed judicial gloss.