Definition
A term from Saxon law denoting military service, specifically the obligation of a tenant to render armed service to a lord or sovereign in exchange for landholding. The word is closely associated with scutage — the commuted money payment that gradually replaced actual military service — and reflects the foundational structure of early feudal land tenure in Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest English law.
Why It Matters in Research
Herschildt is a term you are unlikely to encounter outside of historical legal dictionaries and antiquarian treatments of Saxon and feudal law. Its primary research value is as a navigational anchor: when encountered in a historical source, it signals that the surrounding text concerns the military obligations attached to land tenure in the pre- and early post-Conquest period, not civilian or contractual service obligations.
Researchers working in the feudal tenure literature should note the relationship between herschildt and scutage carefully. Scutage is the more commonly indexed and cross-referenced term in both legal and historical sources; herschildt tends to appear in earlier or more technically precise treatments that distinguish the original service obligation from its monetary commutation. If your source uses herschildt, it may be drawing a distinction that scutage-focused sources collapse.
The term also connects to the broader constellation of Saxon military tenure terms — knight's service, serjeanty, and the fyrd — which later English common law absorbed, transformed, or abolished. Researchers tracing the evolution of land tenure from Saxon through Norman practice will find herschildt useful as a period marker: its appearance in a source suggests engagement with pre-Conquest or early post-Conquest material, often derived from Spelman or similarly oriented antiquarian scholarship.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source providing a formal entry. Burrill defines herschildt as Saxon in origin, compounded from her (army) and schildt (shield), and glosses it as military service or scutage, citing Spelman. The entry is compact and essentially referential — Burrill treats the term as requiring no extended elaboration, pointing the reader toward Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum for deeper treatment.
The reliance on Spelman is significant. Sir Henry Spelman's seventeenth-century glossary of obsolete legal and historical terms is the primary original source for many Saxon legal terms that passed into English legal dictionaries, and Burrill follows that lineage here. Researchers should be aware that this chain of transmission — Spelman to later legal dictionaries — means the definition reflects seventeenth-century antiquarian scholarship on Saxon law, not direct access to Saxon legal texts. The gloss of herschildt as equivalent to scutage may slightly flatten a distinction: herschildt properly denotes the underlying obligation of military service, while scutage is specifically its commuted form. Burrill's conflation of the two reflects the dictionary tradition rather than analytical precision.
No entry for herschildt appears in the other major historical legal dictionaries — not in Bouvier, Black, or Tomlin — suggesting it was treated as sufficiently obscure or sufficiently covered by the scutage entry to warrant omission. Its presence in Burrill reflects that dictionary's relatively expansive treatment of Saxon and feudal terminology.
Jurisdictional Note
Herschildt is a term specific to English legal history. It has no meaningful application in American law, and no common law jurisdiction outside England retained the Saxon tenure framework that gave the term its operative context. Its relevance is historical and antiquarian.