Definition
A Scottish legal process by which a creditor enforces a debt by seizing and appropriating the movable property of a debtor. Poinding transfers the property of the debtor directly to the creditor in satisfaction of the debt. It is the Scots law counterpart to the English process of distress (distraint). The term derives from Scots legal usage and appears throughout Scottish private law as the principal form of diligence operating against movable subjects.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Present participle and gerund of "poind" — no independent common definition offered.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not independently defined as a common English word.
Editorial note: Poinding is essentially pure legal jargon of Scots law with no meaningful common English counterpart. The word will be unfamiliar to most readers outside Scottish legal practice. Researchers should not assume any intuitive meaning from the ordinary English vocabulary.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Three recognized forms appear consistently across the historical sources:
Real Poinding (Poinding of the Ground): A creditor holding a security over land is empowered to appropriate both the rents of the land and the movable goods of the debtor or the debtor's tenants found on that land, applying them toward satisfaction of the secured debt. The characterization as "real" refers to the land-based security giving rise to the diligence, not to the conveyance of heritable property.
Personal Poinding: The seizure of goods belonging personally to the debtor, and those goods only. It proceeds on the warrant of letters of horning containing a poinding clause, executed by messengers-at-arms. This is the form most directly analogous to personal execution against a judgment debtor's movables in common law systems.
Poinding of the Ground (as distinct action): Sometimes treated as its own category separate from the broader "real" classification, emphasizing that the creditor's right runs against the subjects on the land rather than against a named individual debtor.
Why It Matters in Research
Poinding is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in sources dealing with Scots law, Scottish legal history, or comparative law. Several navigational points are worth noting:
First, the English-law analogue is distress or distraint, and many historical sources — including Black's — introduce poinding by reference to that comparison. Researchers consulting English legal dictionaries for context on Scottish materials should understand that the analogy is approximate; the procedural mechanics, the role of "diligence" in Scots private law, and the conceptual framework differ materially.
Second, the corpus of historical Scottish institutional writing is the primary authoritative source. Erskine's Institutes (cited in Bouvier) is the foundational reference. Bell's Commentaries and Stair's Institutions are the other major institutional texts in the Scots law tradition and will contain more detailed treatment than any English-language legal dictionary.
Third, the term "diligence" in Scots law is a term of art meaning judicial enforcement process generally — roughly equivalent to "execution" in English legal usage. Poinding is one species of diligence; researchers who encounter references to "diligence" in Scottish materials should understand poinding as a subset, not a synonym.
Fourth, poinding underwent significant statutory reform in Scotland in the modern era, culminating in the Debt Arrangement and Attachment (Scotland) Act 2002, which largely replaced poinding with "attachment" for most purposes. Historical dictionary entries predate this reform entirely. Researchers using the historical sources to understand current Scots law enforcement procedure will find that the terminology has shifted substantially.
Fifth, the term appears in historical American legal dictionaries primarily because of the influence of Scots-trained lawyers and Scottish legal concepts in early American jurisprudence, and because of the practice among nineteenth-century American lexicographers of including comparative law entries. Poinding itself has no application in American domestic law.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources agree on the core definition: poinding is the Scottish diligence by which movable property of a debtor is seized and transferred to a creditor. All four sources consistently draw the comparison to English distress, and all recognize the real/personal division.
Black's (both editions) defines poinding by analogy to distress, which is a useful orientation for common law researchers but can mislead if taken too far. The English distress action carried distinct procedural characteristics and was heavily tied to landlord-tenant law; poinding as a creditor's enforcement remedy had a broader application under Scots law.
Rapalje & Lawrence offers a useful definitional gloss — "the diligence which the law has devised for transferring the property of the debtor to the creditor in payment of his debt" — that captures the direct property-transfer character of the remedy more precisely than the distress analogy alone.
Bouvier draws directly on Erskine's Institutes for authority, citing Erskine, Inst. 3.6.11, and provides the clearest statement that poinding operates against movable subjects specifically, distinguishing it from diligence affecting heritable (real) property. Bouvier also provides the most developed treatment of personal poinding's procedural requirements.
None of the historical dictionaries address the statutory reform of Scots diligence law that unfolded in the twentieth century, and none would be reliable as guides to current Scottish practice.
Jurisdictional Note
Poinding is a term and process native to Scots law. It has no application in English law, American law, or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers will encounter it only in Scottish legal sources, comparative law contexts, or historical materials influenced by Scottish legal practice. Current Scots law has substantially replaced poinding with statutory attachment procedures.