Definition
An archaic term appearing in old English statutes referring to a type of hand-gun, approximately three-quarters of a yard in length. The term is essentially obsolete and appears only in historical legislative contexts, where it was used to describe a specific category of firearm subject to regulation or restriction. It is not a term of art in modern law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A surname.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed.
The common modern encounter with "haque" is as a proper name, bearing no relationship to the statutory sense. A researcher encountering the term in an old English statute should not treat it as a personal name or title; it denotes a weapon classification.
Common Confusion
HAQUE / ARQUEBUS / HACKBUT: These terms all describe variants of early firearms from the same historical period and likely share a common linguistic root. Historical statutes may use different spellings—haque, haquebut, hackbut, harquebus—to refer to weapons that are functionally similar or identical. A researcher working with sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English legislation on weapons should treat variant spellings as potentially synonymous and cross-check glossaries specific to that period.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a historical artifact with a narrow and specific application. It will appear only in early English statutory texts—most likely from the Tudor or early Stuart periods—where Parliament regulated the manufacture, carrying, or use of firearms. Researchers should be alert to the following:
Spelling instability: Early modern English statutes were not orthographically consistent. "Haque" may appear as "haquebut," "hackbut," "hagbut," or similar variants within the same corpus. Keyword searching on a single spelling will miss related entries.
Scope of regulation: When haque appears in a statute, the surrounding text typically concerns who may possess the weapon, in what circumstances, and under what penalties. The weapon's physical description—three-quarters of a yard—was a definitional threshold used to distinguish regulated firearms from unregulated ones, a legislative drafting technique that recurs in later arms-control statutes under different terminology.
No modern survival: This term has no modern legal counterpart and no continuing statutory life. It should not be used to interpret contemporary firearms law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries—Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's—agree on the substance: haque is a hand-gun of approximately three-quarters of a yard in length, appearing in old statutes. Bouvier adds the specification "hand-gun" where Black's first edition is slightly less precise. The second edition of Black's appears to contain a partial additional note referencing "old European law," suggesting the term or a cognate had broader continental usage, though that passage is fragmentary in the available text.
None of the historical dictionaries provide the specific statutes in which the term appeared, the date range of its use, or any discussion of how courts or administrators interpreted the length specification. This is a gap researchers should anticipate: the dictionaries treat haque as a definitional entry only, not as a term with interpretive history.