Definition
A form of territorial jurisdiction in Scotland granted by the Crown to a subject lord. When lands were conveyed *in liberam regalitatem* — in free regality — the recipient, styled a "lord of regality," exercised within that territory a jurisdiction approximating the Crown's own. This meant the lord could hold courts, try certain serious crimes, and administer justice largely independent of the ordinary royal sheriff courts. Regality was among the most extensive forms of heritable jurisdiction known in Scots law, exceeded only by the Crown itself.
The institution was distinctly Scottish. It has no direct English common law equivalent, though it bears structural resemblance to the palatinate jurisdictions of England (such as Durham and Chester), where a subject lord held quasi-regal powers within a defined territory.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Royalty; sovereignty; sovereign jurisdiction.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Royalty; sovereignty; sovereign jurisdiction. Also, an ensign or badge of royalty (marked as obsolete by 1913).
The common meaning describes an abstract quality — the condition or character of being royal. The legal meaning is narrower and institutional: not the quality of royalty in general, but a specific, formally constituted territorial jurisdiction granted by the Scottish Crown to a private lord. A researcher encountering "regality" in a general literary source may find it used loosely to mean sovereignty or kingly dignity; in a legal or historical Scottish source, it names a concrete jurisdictional grant with defined legal consequences.
Why It Matters in Research
Regality belongs almost exclusively to pre-1747 Scots legal history. The Heritable Jurisdictions (Scotland) Act 1747, passed in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising, abolished regalities along with most other heritable jurisdictions. This means the term is essentially dormant in modern Scottish law and will appear in the Law Mind corpus primarily in historical, feudal, and constitutional contexts — land grants, court records, treatises on Scots feudal tenure, and discussions of the 1747 abolition.
Researchers should be alert to two traps. First, sources predating 1747 treat regality as a living institution with practical procedural significance; sources written after abolition discuss it in the past tense as part of the constitutional settlement following Culloden. The tone and doctrinal weight shift sharply across that date. Second, the Latin phrase *in liberam regalitatem* appears in charters and conveyancing instruments; researchers working with charter evidence will need to recognize this phrase as the operative grant language rather than purely descriptive text.
Regality should not be confused with barony, which was a lower-grade heritable jurisdiction in Scotland also abolished in 1747 (though baronial courts were partially restored in modified form by the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000). The lord of regality held a significantly broader criminal jurisdiction than a baron.
Connections in the corpus: entries touching Scottish feudal tenure, heritable jurisdictions, palatinate, and the constitutional consequences of the 1745–46 period will provide essential context for understanding regality in operation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's are in close agreement, offering virtually identical definitions sourced to Bell (George Joseph Bell, the authoritative Scottish institutional writer). The definition is compact and accurate as far as it goes: territorial jurisdiction in Scotland, Crown grant, lands held *in liberam regalitatem*, holder termed lord of regality.
What Black's does not capture is the substantive scope of the jurisdiction — the fact that a lord of regality could, for example, reclaim a criminal "repledged" from a royal court on the ground that the accused was his man, or that regality courts exercised what amounted to the four pleas of the Crown (the most serious criminal matters) within their bounds. Black's treats regality as a definitional entry rather than an institutional one; researchers needing operational detail should look to Scots institutional writers, particularly Stair's *Institutions of the Law of Scotland* and Erskine's *Institute of the Law of Scotland*, which address heritable jurisdictions in context.
Webster's 1913 reflects only the general linguistic meaning — royalty and sovereignty — without any awareness of the technical Scots legal usage. This divergence confirms that the term's legal meaning is specialized and not derivable from ordinary usage.
Jurisdictional Note
Regality is a term of Scots law with no operative modern equivalent. It does not appear as a living concept in English, Irish, or American legal systems, though palatinate jurisdictions in England offer a structural analogy. Researchers working in any other jurisdiction will encounter it only as a comparative or historical reference.