Definition
In Scots law and older English legal usage, reset has two distinct meanings:
1. The receiving or harboring of a proscribed or outlawed person. One who provided shelter or concealment to an outlaw or fugitive from justice committed reset, and was termed a resetter.
2. Reset of theft (Scots law): The receiving and retaining of stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen, with the intent to keep them from the rightful owner. The offense also extends to harboring or concealing the thief. This Scots doctrine is the functional equivalent of receiving stolen goods in English and American common law traditions.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To set back to an initial state; to set to zero; to adjust or reposition.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To set again, as in resetting type, copy, or a gemstone.
The common meaning of reset — to restore something to a prior condition — shares no meaningful overlap with the legal doctrine. A researcher encountering reset in a legal source should not import the modern technological sense (resetting a device) or even the typographic sense. The legal term describes a distinct criminal act, not a procedural or remedial action.
Common Confusion
Reset is easily confused with receiving stolen goods or the common law offense of accessory after the fact. Reset of theft in Scots law resembles receiving stolen goods, but the Scots formulation also captures the harboring of the thief as a separate branch of liability. The two doctrines developed independently and should not be treated as interchangeable in historical sources. Reset as harboring an outlaw (distinct from reset of theft) is further removed from modern concepts and may be misread as a neutral procedural term if encountered without context.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Reset (general): Harboring or concealing a proscribed or outlawed person.
Reset of theft: Receiving stolen goods with knowledge of their stolen character, or harboring the thief. Bell's Dictionary and Burrill both treat these as connected but separable branches of the same Scots offense.
Why It Matters in Research
Reset is an almost exclusively Scots and archaic English term. Researchers working in English common law sources from the seventeenth century onward will rarely encounter it except as a transplant from Scottish sources. It appears in English legal dictionaries primarily because Cowell's Interpreter catalogued it, and subsequent compilers — Bouvier, Rapalje, Black — carried the entry forward without significant development.
The critical research trap is terminological: reset appears in modern legal contexts with entirely different meanings (resetting a statute of limitations, resetting bail conditions, resetting a judgment), and older sources use the term in the criminal-law sense. These meanings are unrelated. Confirm the date and jurisdiction of any source before assuming which sense applies.
For researchers working in Scottish legal history, reset of theft remains a live doctrinal concept with a continuous development through Scots criminal law. The Burrill entry's reference to Bell's Dictionary points toward the more developed Scots treatment, which is the appropriate source for doctrine rather than the abbreviated English dictionary entries.
The term resetter (the person who commits reset) appears in some sources as a separate headword and should be cross-checked when researching reset.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries largely copy from a single source. Black's (1st Ed.), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier all reproduce the same one-line definition with attribution to Cowell, indicating the English reception of the term was shallow and secondhand. None of these sources developed the doctrinal content independently.
Black's (2nd Ed.) and Burrill add the Scots dimension — reset of theft — and Burrill provides the richer account, drawing on Bell's Dictionary and Skene's De Verborum Significatione, both Scottish authorities. Burrill also gestures toward the word's etymological connection to the old term reseantisa (settled dwelling or abode), which is useful context for understanding why harboring carries the concept's core meaning: providing a place of refuge.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any treatment of reset as a doctrine with elements, defenses, or procedural history within Scots law. They record its existence but do not explain how Scots courts applied it. Researchers needing substantive doctrine must go beyond the dictionary shelf.
Jurisdictional Note
Reset is a Scots law term with no direct common law equivalent in England or the United States. American and English researchers will not encounter it as operative law. Scots law retains reset of theft as a recognized offense within its distinct criminal law tradition, separate from English-derived receiving stolen goods statutes.