Definition
In old Scotch law, hardittis (also spelled hardetts) denotes lions. The term appears in early Scottish criminal trial records and is an archaic descriptive or heraldic term drawn from the Scots legal vocabulary. Its use is confined to historical Scottish sources, and it carries no operative legal meaning in modern law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering hardittis in Scottish legal records should treat it as a specialized piece of old Scots vocabulary rather than a term of art with doctrinal content. Its appearance in the criminal trial records cited by Burrill — specifically Pitcairn's Criminal Trials — signals that the surrounding document likely dates from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when archaic Scots orthography and vocabulary were standard in court proceedings. The variant spelling hardetts reflects the instability of spelling in pre-standardization Scottish legal writing; researchers should search both forms when working through manuscript or early printed sources. Because the term is purely descriptive rather than operative, it will not be found in statutory indexes or legal digests. Its value to researchers is contextual: it helps date and authenticate documents and may signal heraldic or symbolic content in the surrounding text. Cross-reference with Hardheidis, the related term flagged by Burrill, which may appear in the same source documents.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is brief: hardittis means hardetts or lions, with attribution to Pitcairn's Criminal Trials. Burrill does nothing more than record the term and point readers toward its cognate, Hardheidis. No other standard historical legal dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier, not Jacob's Law Dictionary — appears to have carried this term, which confirms its extreme narrowness of use. The citation to Pitcairn (1 Pitc. Cr. Trials, part 1, p. 82) is a genuine and well-known source: Robert Pitcairn's Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, a nineteenth-century compilation of Scottish criminal proceedings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a recognized primary source for old Scots legal language and remains accessible in research libraries and digitized collections. Researchers relying solely on Burrill should note that his entry gives no grammatical context — whether hardittis appeared as a noun, a descriptive element in a charge, or a heraldic designation in the original trial record is not explained.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusively Scottish in origin and has no counterpart in English common law or in the legal vocabulary of any other jurisdiction. It is relevant only to researchers working in historical Scottish legal materials.