Definition
A ceremonial form of heritable succession used in old Scots law by which an heir was formally entered into possession of property situated within a royal burgh. The ceremony required the heir to physically grasp the hasp and staple — the latch and fastening loop — of the property's door, an act that served as the symbolic transfer of possession, accompanied by other prescribed formalities. A bailee (typically a legal officer or judge) presided over the proceeding, adjudged the person to be the rightful heir on evidence presented before him, and delivered the property by directing the heir's engagement with the door hardware.
The term refers both to the physical objects (the door fastening components) and to the legal ceremony of which that act was the central feature.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A hasp is a hinged metal clasp that fits over a staple (a U-shaped loop) and is secured by a padlock or pin; together they form a simple door or gate fastening mechanism. The term is in ordinary use in hardware and construction contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Hasp — A clasp, especially a metal strap, passing over a staple to be fastened by a padlock." The pairing of hasp and staple was a familiar household hardware description.
The gap is significant: in common usage, hasp and staple describes a functional piece of door hardware. In Scots law, the same objects became a legal instrument of conveyance — the act of grasping them was not incidental but constitutive of the heir's legal entry into possession. Researchers encountering the phrase in a legal context should not read it as a physical description but as a reference to a defined ceremony of succession.
Common Confusion
Hasp and staple is sometimes loosely grouped with other symbolic delivery ceremonies (such as livery of seisin in English law), and the two share conceptual DNA. They are not, however, the same procedure. Livery of seisin was an English common law institution operating on freehold land generally; hasp and staple was a specifically Scottish form tied to burgage tenure within royal burghs. Conflating them obscures both the jurisdictional boundary and the tenurial specificity of each.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially a historical artifact of pre-Union Scots law and will appear only in older Scottish legal materials, historical treatises on Scots property law, and the legal dictionaries that carried the term forward for reference purposes. Researchers should be aware of several navigational points:
First, the procedure was specific to burgage tenure — the form of landholding characteristic of royal burghs in Scotland. It does not appear in connection with other Scottish tenures (such as feu or blench tenure) and should not be read into those contexts.
Second, the sources agree that this was the form of heir's entry, but Bouvier adds a detail absent from the others: the explicit mention of a bailee adjudicating the heir's right before delivering possession. This adjudicatory element distinguishes the proceeding from a purely ceremonial delivery and suggests a quasi-judicial character that the other dictionary entries understate.
Third, the Scots law context means that primary sources will be in older Scots legal literature. Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland is the source cited by all five dictionaries here and is the natural primary reference. Erskine's Principles (cited by Bouvier at Pr. 433) is the other key treatise.
Fourth, researchers using English-language legal dictionaries to trace this term should note that none of the sources provide significant procedural detail beyond the basic description. The dictionaries essentially copy one another, with Burrill and both Black's editions drawing directly from Bell. Bouvier's divergence on the bailee's role is worth flagging as it adds substance not found in the others.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five source dictionaries show a tight chain of agreement with minor variation. Burrill's Law Dictionary and both editions of Black's Law Dictionary use nearly identical language describing the heir taking hold of the hasp and staple as "the symbol of possession, with other formalities" — language attributed to Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland. Rapalje & Lawrence is the most compressed, correctly identifying this as a form of entry under burgage tenure and directing readers to Bell.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the most substantively distinct. It frames the proceeding with greater procedural clarity — the bailee's role in adjudicating the heir's claim before making symbolic delivery — and cites Erskine's Principles directly. This makes Bouvier the most useful of the five for understanding the legal mechanics rather than merely the symbolic gesture.
No dictionary provides a date of obsolescence or notes when the procedure ceased to be used. Researchers should treat this as a feature of the pre-modernized Scots property system and anticipate that it fell out of practice as formal succession procedures were regularized. None of the sources discuss the procedure's relationship to the feudal system's abolition in Scotland or subsequent land reform, because those developments postdate or were beyond the scope of these dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
This is a term of Scots law exclusively. It has no application in English common law, no reception in American law, and no analogous institution in civil law jurisdictions. Researchers working in English legal history who encounter the phrase should treat it as a signal that a Scottish source has entered the material under review.