Definition
In historical English law, "hue" is an abbreviated form of the compound term "hue and cry" — the mandatory public outcry raised upon the commission of a felony, requiring all who heard it to join in the pursuit of the suspected offender. Used alone, the word "hue" rarely appears in legal texts independent of its companion "cry," and its standalone legal significance is inseparable from that compound. As an isolated legal term, it denotes the alarm itself — the audible signal that set the community-enforcement mechanism in motion under the old common law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A color, shade of color, or tint; also used figuratively to mean character or aspect.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Color or shade of color; tint; dye. "Flowers of all hue." — Milton.
The gap here is nearly total. In ordinary English, "hue" refers exclusively to color or visual quality. In law, the word carries no connection to color whatsoever. Its legal life is phonetic and functional: a loud outcry, a shout of alarm. A researcher encountering "hue" in a historical legal source must resist the instinct to read it as descriptive language and recognize it instead as shorthand for a technical legal mechanism.
Common Confusion
"Hue" is sometimes encountered in older legal manuscripts and abridgments as a standalone word where "hue and cry" is plainly intended. The truncation is an artifact of scribal economy and marginal notation, not a distinct legal concept. Researchers should not treat "hue" and "hue and cry" as separate terms with independent meanings — they refer to the same institution. Separately, the Burrill entry appearing in the source material under this headword concerns "housebote" (necessary timber for repair), a likely misfiling or pagination artifact in the dictionary source; that content belongs to a different entry entirely and should not be associated with the legal meaning of "hue."
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research risk with "hue" as a standalone entry is encountering it in digitized or manually indexed historical sources where it has been separated from "cry" through transcription error, line breaks, or index truncation. Searches limited to "hue" alone will miss the bulk of relevant material, which appears under "hue and cry" in virtually every legal dictionary, treatise, and case report.
In the Law Mind corpus, researchers tracing community policing obligations, posse comitatus, watch-and-ward statutes, or the origins of citizen's arrest doctrine will find "hue and cry" the operative term. The institution it describes was a formal legal duty in England from at least the Statute of Winchester (1285) through the gradual development of professional constabulary in the nineteenth century. American colonial law imported the concept, and traces appear in early state statutes well into the 1800s.
The misfiled Burrill content (housebote) signals a practical hazard in working with scanned historical dictionaries: pagination artifacts and OCR errors can place unrelated content under a headword. Cross-check any surprising entry content against the surrounding pages before drawing conclusions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry under this headword, as rendered in the available source, does not in fact address "hue" in its legal sense — the text concerns housebote, a tenant's right to cut timber for repair. This is almost certainly a digitization or pagination error. Burrill's Dictionary does treat "hue and cry" substantively elsewhere, consistent with its treatment in other major historical law dictionaries including Tomlin's, Bouvier's, and Jacob's. Those sources uniformly describe the hue and cry as a common law obligation rooted in the collective responsibility of the community (township or hundred) to apprehend felons, with the hundred bearing civil liability if the felon escaped and the victim went uncompensated.
What the historical dictionaries collectively illuminate — and what modern sources underemphasize — is the quasi-constitutional character of the obligation: the hue and cry was not a discretionary act of civic virtue but a legal duty, the failure of which had consequences. That dimension is essential context for researchers working on the history of law enforcement, collective liability, or the transition from communal to professional policing.
Jurisdictional Note
The hue and cry was an English common law institution; its formal statutory basis was largely English. American reception was uneven — some colonial and early state jurisdictions codified versions of the duty, others absorbed it informally through common law inheritance. Researchers working in American sources after roughly 1850 will find the concept increasingly vestigial.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: HUE AND CRY