HARRIOTT

5 definitions found across Law Mind sources

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HARRIOTTAuthored
The Law Mind • 402 words
Definition
An archaic spelling variant of HERIOT. The term appears in older legal texts and manuscripts as an alternate form of the same feudal obligation, with no substantive distinction in meaning from heriot. For the operative legal definition, see HERIOT.
Why It Matters in Research
Harriott functions exclusively as a spelling variant and should be treated as a search and transcription trap rather than an independent legal concept. Researchers working in pre-modern English legal records — particularly manorial court rolls, copyhold conveyances, and early treatises — may encounter this spelling and fail to connect it to the body of doctrine developed under the heriot heading. Historical legal dictionaries uniformly redirect the entry to heriot without elaborating separate rules, which is itself instructive: the variant had no independent doctrinal life. The practical risk is in full-text corpus searches. A search limited to "heriot" will miss instances spelled "harriott," "harriot," "hariot," or other variants common in manuscript sources. Conversely, a researcher encountering "harriott" in a primary source should not assume the term carries a meaning distinct from heriot simply because it looks different. The spelling reflects scribal inconsistency, regional practice, and the general instability of legal orthography before standardization, not a substantive legal distinction.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — are in complete agreement: harriott is the old form of heriot, citing Williams on Seisin at page 203 as the authority for that identification. None of the sources elaborates further, which reflects the correct treatment of the term as a pure orthographic variant. Rapalje & Lawrence embeds the redirect within a compressed entry alongside unrelated terms (hart, hawkers and pedlers, hawking), suggesting that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, harriott warranted only the briefest acknowledgment before directing readers elsewhere. No historical source attributes independent legal significance to the harriott spelling.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See HERIOT (Law Mind Encyclopedia) for the full treatment of the feudal and manorial obligation to which this term refers.
Related Terms
Heriot — the term of which harriott is a variant form Copyhold — the tenure most commonly associated with heriot obligations Manorial courts — the forum in which heriot rights were typically enforced Seisin — connected doctrinal context; see Williams on Seisinthe source cited by all three dictionaries
HARRIOTTmain
Black's Law Dictionary • 1891
The old form of "heriot," (9. o.) Williams, Seis. 203.
HARRIOTTmain
Rapalje & Lawrence • 1888
- The old form of "heriot" (q. v.) Wms. Seis. 203. HART.-A stag five years old. (single act of selling does not constitute). 1 Burr. 609. HAWKERS AND PEDLERS, (in a statute). 2 Watts (Pa.) 299. HAWKING, (what constitutes). 10 Wend. (N. Y.) 99.
HARRIOTTmain
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) • 1910
The old form of “heriot,” (q. v.) Williams, Seis. 203.
Harriottname
Wiktionary (English) • 2026
Wiktionary contributors • CC BY-SA 4.0 • via Kaikki
Extracted and formatted for display by Law Mind. Source link opens the current Wiktionary page and its contributor history; it is not a frozen copy of this extract.
A surname.

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