Definition
A fine or monetary penalty imposed for disobedience to a proclamation of warfare. In medieval feudal practice, a lord or sovereign could issue a formal call to arms requiring eligible men to muster for military service. Herischulde denoted the specific financial sanction levied against those who failed to answer that summons. The term belongs to the vocabulary of early Germanic and Scottish feudal law.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term researchers are likely to encounter only in historical sources dealing with Scottish or northern European feudal law, particularly texts concerned with military tenure and the obligations that attached to landholding. Bouvier cites Skene — a reference to Sir John Skene's late sixteenth-century work on Scottish legal terms — which signals that the primary documentary trail for this concept runs through early modern Scottish legal scholarship rather than English common law sources.
Researchers working in Law Mind sources should be alert to several navigational points. First, herischulde is not a term of art in English common law; it does not appear in Blackstone or the standard English treatise tradition. It surfaces in Scottish and Continental contexts, meaning a researcher following a thread from English sources will likely need to pivot to Scottish legal history materials. Second, the concept it describes — a fine for failure to answer a military muster — overlaps with related feudal obligations such as escuage (scutage) and the various amercements for failure of suit, but herischulde should not be conflated with those English equivalents. The Scottish and Germanic feudal systems organized military obligation differently, and the terminology carries specific institutional weight within those traditions. Third, because the term is rare even in historical legal dictionaries, its appearance in a document can itself be a significant clue about the provenance, jurisdiction, or period of that document.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the primary historical dictionary source for this entry and offers only a single-line definition: "A fine for disobedience to proclamation of warfare," with a citation to Skene. This brevity is itself informative. The entry appears in Bouvier's as a term of record rather than a term in active American use — Bouvier was thorough in cataloguing historical and foreign legal vocabulary for reference purposes, not because herischulde had any contemporary application in nineteenth-century American law.
The citation to Skene refers to De Verborum Significatione, John Skene's 1597 glossary of Scottish legal terms, one of the foundational works of early modern Scottish legal scholarship. That source situates herischulde firmly in the medieval and early modern Scottish legal tradition. No other major English-language legal dictionary of the standard shelf gives this term independent treatment, which confirms that it remained a term of historical and comparative interest rather than one with ongoing doctrinal life.
Researchers should be aware that historical dictionaries sometimes anglicize or simplify terms drawn from Germanic or Scottish Gaelic legal vocabulary, and the definition as recorded by Bouvier may flatten distinctions that Skene's original treatment preserved.
Jurisdictional Note
Herischulde is a term of Scottish and Germanic feudal law with no recognized application in English common law or American law. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a marker of Scottish or northern European feudal legal context.