Definition
Rescyt (also spelled resceit) is an archaic Law French term denoting the act of receiving or harboring a felon after the commission of a crime. It is an early form of what modern law calls accessory after the fact or harboring a fugitive — the knowing concealment or shelter of a person who has committed a criminal offense.
The term describes a completed act of reception: the person charged with rescyt has already taken the felon in, sheltered them, or otherwise provided refuge with knowledge of the underlying crime. It is distinct from participation in the crime itself.
Common Confusion
Rescyt is sometimes loosely equated with misprision of felony, but the two are not identical. Misprision historically encompassed the failure to report a felony, even without active concealment or harboring. Rescyt implies an affirmative act — the physical reception or sheltering of the felon — making it closer to the modern offense of accessory after the fact or harboring a fugitive. Researchers should not treat the terms as interchangeable when reading historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
Rescyt is purely a historical term and will not appear in modern statutory or case law. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in medieval English legal texts, early common law treatises, and glossaries drawn from the Anglo-Norman legal tradition. Its presence in a source signals engagement with pre-modern criminal law doctrine, particularly the classification of post-crime assistance to offenders.
The primary danger for corpus researchers is orthographic: the term appears in multiple spellings across historical manuscripts — rescyt, resceit, receit, and receipt — and automated search tools may not surface all variants. Searching only one spelling risks missing relevant passages. The shared root with the ordinary English word "receipt" creates additional noise in full-text searches.
Researchers using this term as a conceptual entry point should follow it to the modern doctrinal equivalents: accessory after the fact and misprision of felony. The Law French form signals that the source is likely pre-eighteenth century; by the time of Blackstone's Commentaries, the English-language terminology had substantially displaced Law French equivalents in most treatises.
Because rescyt concerns post-crime assistance rather than conspiracy or participation, researchers should not assume continuity of meaning with terms covering pre-crime or contemporaneous involvement such as abettor or principal in the second degree.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term, each offering nearly identical single-sentence definitions. All three attribute the definition to Britton (cited as Britt. c. 23), the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise compiled under Edward I. This unanimity reflects the narrowness of the term's usage rather than independent verification — all three likely traced the same source lineage.
Notably, none of the three dictionaries elaborates on whether rescyt carried criminal penalties distinct from the underlying felony, what mental state was required, or how it related to contemporary distinctions between accessories and principals. Researchers seeking substantive doctrine beyond the bare definition will need to consult the primary source — Britton itself — or broader treatments of early English criminal law. The historical dictionaries function here as glossaries rather than doctrinal guides.
The Law French label (L. Fr.) is consistent across all entries, correctly situating the term within the Anglo-Norman legal vocabulary that dominated English legal writing from the Norman Conquest through roughly the seventeenth century.