Definition
Lords of Erection is a historical Scottish legal term referring to secular nobles and royal favorites to whom the Crown granted former ecclesiastical landholdings following the Protestant Reformation. When the Reformation dissolved the institutional authority of abbeys and priories in Scotland, the king — now claiming proprietorship over the lands and benefices previously administered by abbots and priors — redistributed those holdings as temporal lordships. The recipients of these grants were called Lords of Erection, the title deriving from the legal act of "erecting" ecclesiastical property into a secular temporal lordship. The term describes both the tenure created and the persons holding it.
Common Confusion
The phrase "lords of erection" is occasionally misread by researchers unfamiliar with Scottish ecclesiastical history as a generic feudal title or confused with other Reformation-era Scottish lordships, such as Lords of Regality. The distinction matters: Lords of Regality held quasi-jurisdictional powers over territory; Lords of Erection held a specific class of converted ecclesiastical property. The two categories could overlap in practice — the same person might hold both — but they are legally distinct in origin and character. Rapalje & Lawrence does not appear to carry a substantive entry for this term, suggesting it was treated as sufficiently Scottish and specialized that American legal dictionaries of the period did not engage with it directly.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely confined to Scottish legal history and will appear primarily in sources dealing with post-Reformation land tenure, the commutation of teinds (tithes), and the settlement of Scottish church property rights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Researchers working in this period should be aware of several navigational points.
First, the term's relevance peaked between roughly 1560 and the mid-seventeenth century, when disputes over erection lands and the rights of Lords of Erection were actively litigated and legislated in the Scottish Parliament. By the time of the Acts of Union (1707), the tenure class had largely been absorbed into ordinary Scottish heritable property law, and the label drops from active legal usage.
Second, the word "erection" here carries a precise technical meaning — the formal legal act of converting one type of holding into another — that is entirely distinct from its common meaning. Researchers searching historical indices or full-text databases should use the full phrase "lords of erection" rather than either word alone to avoid noise.
Third, the connection to teind law is significant and often underdiscussed. Lords of Erection frequently acquired not only the land of suppressed monasteries but also the right to collect teinds from surrounding parishes. This created prolonged disputes between erection lords and heritors (landowners obligated to pay teinds) that ran well into the seventeenth century and were addressed by major Scottish legislation. A researcher who encounters this term in a teind dispute context should connect it to that broader body of law.
Fourth, because Rapalje & Lawrence — an American legal dictionary — effectively omits this term, and because Black's and Bouvier's entries are brief and derivative of Wharton's Law Lexicon, researchers needing depth will need to move beyond the standard Anglo-American dictionary shelf entirely and consult Scottish institutional writers and parliamentary records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary carry nearly identical brief entries, both citing Wharton as their source, which itself reflects the term's treatment as a curiosity of Scottish ecclesiastical history rather than living law by the time these dictionaries were compiled. Both entries correctly identify the mechanism — the Crown redistributing former abbatial and priorial benefices to secular favorites as temporal lordships — but neither elaborates on the legal consequences of erection tenure or its subsequent history.
Rapalje & Lawrence does not contain a substantive entry for this term. The entry retrieved under this heading in that source is plainly a misfiled fragment relating to the word "to" as used in legal instruments, which has no connection to Lords of Erection. Researchers should treat the Rapalje & Lawrence record as a source gap for this term rather than authority.
The brevity of the historical dictionary treatment is itself informative: by the nineteenth century, when these dictionaries were written, Lords of Erection was a dead tenure of antiquarian rather than practical interest, and the dictionaries reflect that status accordingly. For substantive treatment, the Scottish institutional writers — particularly Stair's Institutions of the Law of Scotland and Erskine's Institute of the Law of Scotland — offer more developed accounts of erection tenure and its place in the broader structure of Scottish land law.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusively Scottish in origin and application. It has no counterpart in English, Irish, or American law. Researchers working in jurisdictions outside Scotland will encounter it only in comparative historical discussions or in the context of Scottish estates held by persons who also had English legal interests.