Definition
An archaic Latin term appearing in old Scots law records meaning a satchel, pouch, or provision bag — a small portable container used to carry food or supplies. The term appears in early Scottish criminal trial records and functions as a material descriptor rather than a legal concept in its own right.
Why It Matters in Research
PERA is the kind of term that surfaces unexpectedly in transcriptions of early Scottish legal records and can stop a researcher cold. It carries no doctrinal weight — it is a physical object descriptor, not a legal standard, right, or procedure. Its significance in a given source is almost always evidentiary or factual: the item named as a *pera* may be the subject of a theft charge, a listed piece of evidence, or an inventory entry in a criminal proceeding.
Researchers working in early Scottish criminal records — particularly the Pitcairn Criminal Trials, from which Burrill draws his citation — should treat *pera* as period vocabulary requiring contextual glossing rather than legal analysis. Misreading it as a term of legal art would be an error; it is simply the Latin word used by Scots legal scribes for a bag or pouch.
The term will not appear in modern legal research databases in any operative sense. If it surfaces in a digitized manuscript or transcription, the surrounding context (theft, possession, inventory) will determine its relevance to the matter under study.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only shelf source to record this term, and his treatment is appropriately brief: he identifies it as Law Latin, situates it in old Scots law, glosses it as "a satchel; a poke, budget or bag for provisions," and anchors the citation to Pitcairn's *Criminal Trials of Scotland*. No other major historical legal dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — includes an entry for *pera*, which reflects both its narrow geographic application and its purely descriptive rather than doctrinal function.
Burrill's single-sentence treatment is, in this case, complete. There is nothing to synthesize against competing sources because no competing sources address the term. Researchers should not expect elaboration in other historical dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
PERA in this sense is specific to old Scots law and appears in Latin-language records of Scottish criminal proceedings. It has no traceable usage in English common law sources or in continental legal Latin of comparable significance.