Definition
In old Scots law, hereschip (also spelled herschip or heirship) denotes the crime of theft or robbery, particularly the violent or forcible taking of goods and property. The term appears in early Scottish criminal records and legal proceedings as a designation for what would today be recognized broadly as theft or plunder, sometimes carrying connotations of organized raiding or despoliation of a community or household.
The term is archaic and has no operative role in modern law. It belongs to the vocabulary of early Scots criminal law and is encountered almost exclusively in historical legal texts and criminal trial records.
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Common Confusion
Several related-sounding terms appear in close proximity in the historical dictionaries and should not be confused with hereschip:
HERESLITA, HERESSA, and HERESSIZ are distinct terms referring to a hired soldier who departs military service without authorization — essentially a form of desertion. Though grouped by alphabetical proximity in the dictionaries, these terms describe a military offense rather than a property crime and have no substantive connection to hereschip. Researchers encountering these terms in sequence in Black's or Bouvier's should treat them as separate entries.
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Why It Matters in Research
Hereschip is a term a researcher will encounter only in one context: early Scottish criminal trial records, particularly those collected and published in Robert Pitcairn's Criminal Trials in Scotland (cited as "Pitc. Crim. Tr." across all four source dictionaries). If you are working in that corpus, awareness of the term helps decode the charge laid against a defendant. If you are not working in early Scots criminal history, hereschip is unlikely to appear.
Key navigational points for corpus researchers:
1. SPELLING VARIATION: The term appears in variant forms — hereschip, herschip, heirship — across historical sources. Searches limited to a single spelling will miss occurrences. The variant heirship, in particular, creates a false cognate trap: heirship in most legal traditions refers to the legal status or rights of an heir, not to theft. The phonetic and orthographic overlap between hereschip (robbery) and heirship (succession law) has no semantic basis and should not be treated as evidence of a connected legal concept.
2. JURISDICTIONAL CONTAINMENT: This term is specific to old Scots law. English common law sources, American legal authorities, and civil law materials will not use it. Encountering it in an English or American legal context would be anachronistic and likely indicates a historical quotation or direct reference to Scottish materials.
3. CORPUS CONNECTIONS: The consistent citation across all four dictionaries to Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, Part 2, pages 26 and 89, means that document is the primary primary source. Researchers seeking contextual understanding of how the charge was applied should go there directly. The dictionaries themselves offer no further doctrinal elaboration — they treat hereschip as a term requiring identification rather than analysis.
4. NO MODERN SURVIVAL: Unlike some archaic terms that persist in statute or specialized practice, hereschip has no traceable modern legal usage. It is purely a historical vocabulary item.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), Burrill's, and Bouvier's — are in full agreement on the definition: theft or robbery in old Scots law. The citation to Pitcairn's Criminal Trials is consistent across all entries, suggesting each drew from the same authority rather than from independent verification.
No dictionary offers doctrinal elaboration, distinguishing elements, or commentary on how hereschip differed procedurally or substantively from other theft-related charges in Scottish law. The entries function as identifiers, not analyses.
Burrill adds a secondary citation to "4 Steph. Com. 233," referring to Stephen's Commentaries on the Laws of England — an unusual cross-reference for a term presented as exclusively Scottish in character, though Stephen's Commentaries did address criminal law comparatively.
Black's (1st and 2nd eds.) and Bouvier's append entries for HERESLITA, HERESSA, and HERESSIZ immediately following hereschip, citing Coke's Institutes (4 Inst. 128) for the proposition that these terms describe a hired soldier departing without license. These entries are presented as separate headwords grouped by alphabetical proximity only.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the relationship between hereschip and analogous offenses in Scots common law such as stouthreif (violent robbery), or how the charge was prosecuted procedurally. Researchers requiring that depth must go beyond the dictionary shelf.
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Jurisdictional Note
Hereschip is specific to old Scots law and has no recognized counterpart or usage in English common law or any American legal tradition. It is relevant solely in the context of historical Scottish criminal law research, primarily pre-union Scotland.
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