Definition
An obsolete variant spelling of heriot. Hariot denotes the customary render or payment due to a lord upon the death of a tenant, typically consisting of the tenant's best beast or, in some formulations, the best chattel. The term appears in older legal texts and glossaries as an alternate form of heriot and carries identical legal meaning. Researchers encountering hariot in historical documents should treat it as a direct equivalent.
Common Confusion
HARIOT / HERIOT / HARRIOTT: These are spelling variants of the same legal concept, not distinct legal terms. Hariot, heriot, harriott, and several other spellings all appear in early English legal sources and refer to the same feudal incident. Bouvier's cross-references Cowel and Termes de la Ley for the hariot spelling and Williams on Seisin for the harriott form. The substantive law is the same across all spellings; only the orthographic convention differs. Researchers should not treat variant spellings as evidence of distinct legal obligations.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a paleographic and indexing trap. A researcher working through manuscript court rolls, customals, or early printed abridgments may encounter hariot or harriott and fail to connect the entry to the body of doctrine indexed under heriot in modern reference works. Because historical legal spelling was not standardized, the same instrument or court record might spell the word differently across its own pages.
When searching the Law Mind corpus, query all known variants: hariot, heriot, harriott, heriott. Boolean and proximity searches that fix on a single spelling will produce incomplete results in pre-eighteenth-century sources. Glossaries such as Cowel's Interpreter and Termes de la Ley use hariot specifically, so those sources will surface under this spelling rather than heriot when searching by term.
The substantive content — what a heriot was, who owed it, how it was distinguished from a mortuary, and how it declined with the fall of copyhold tenure — is fully treated under HERIOT. All doctrinal research should proceed under that headword.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry for hariot is deliberately minimal: a redirect. Bouvier cites Cowel and Termes de la Ley as authorities using this spelling and notes Williams on Seisin (p. 203) for the harriott variant. This treatment reflects sound lexicographic practice for a term that is purely a spelling variant — Bouvier declines to duplicate the doctrine and instead points the reader to the canonical form. The entry confirms that by the time of Bouvier's compilation, hariot was already understood as an archaic or variant spelling rather than a term of independent legal art. No historical dictionary surveyed treats hariot as substantively distinct from heriot.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Heriot; Feudal Incidents; Copyhold Tenure.