Definition
An obsolete term from old Scots law designating the twentieth part of a deceased person's movable estate, payable to the bishop of the diocese in which the deceased resided. The quot was a form of ecclesiastical due collected at the time of testament confirmation — the bishop's entitlement arising from the church's role in supervising the administration of estates. It was calculated on the gross movable estate without deduction for debts.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a near-dead letter outside of historical Scots law research and will not appear in modern legal sources. Researchers encountering quot in historical Scottish testamentary or probate records, ecclesiastical court materials, or early institutional writings should understand it as a fiscal incident of testament confirmation, not a general term of inheritance or succession law.
The key practical trap is confusion with the Latin prefix quot- appearing in maxims and brocard collected in the same dictionaries — Burrill's entry, for instance, immediately appends the maxim Quoties dubia interpretatio libertatis est without clear separation, which can mislead a reader scanning quickly into treating the maxim as a definition of quot itself. These are unrelated: the term quot (the ecclesiatical due) and the Latin adverb quoties (meaning "as often as" or "whenever") share a root but are distinct in both function and context.
Researchers working in pre-Reformation or post-Reformation Scottish ecclesiastical court records, commissary court registers, or early institutional writers such as Erskine should treat quot as a technical term of church-state financial administration specific to Scotland. The institution was tied to the confirmatory jurisdiction of bishops over testaments and diminished with the reorganization of Scottish church governance and probate jurisdiction over the post-Reformation period.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement. Black's (both editions) and Burrill's give nearly identical one-sentence definitions referencing Bell's Dictionary as authority. Bouvier adds substantive detail, citing Erskine's Institutes (Book 3, Title 9, Section 11) and clarifying that the calculation was made "without computation of debts" — a point the other dictionaries omit but which matters for understanding how the quot was assessed in practice.
No source dictionary provides meaningful historical depth beyond the bare definition. None discusses when the quot was abolished, how it related to other mortuary dues, or how the commissary courts administered its collection. Researchers needing that context must go to Erskine's Institutes directly or to specialist histories of Scots ecclesiastical law. The historical dictionaries treat this as a glossary entry rather than a substantive legal concept, which accurately reflects its marginal status even in their own era.
Jurisdictional Note
Quot is exclusively a term of old Scots law. It has no counterpart in English common law or in American legal systems. Researchers working outside Scottish ecclesiastical and testamentary history will not encounter it as an operative legal concept.