Definition
In Scots law, the receipt or harboring of a felon, or the concealment of a felony. The term encompasses knowingly sheltering, protecting, or aiding a person who has committed a crime, as well as hiding evidence of that crime. The specific phrase "resset of thift" refers to the concealment of theft — receiving or harboring a thief or the proceeds of theft.
Resset is essentially the Scots law equivalent of what English and American common law treats as accessory after the fact or, in the context of stolen goods, receiving stolen property. The term appears primarily in older Scots legal sources and is effectively obsolete in modern usage, having been displaced by statutory and modernized Scots criminal law vocabulary.
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Common Confusion
RESSET / RESET: Burrill's own entry directs readers to "Reset," which is the more standard and durable Scots law spelling. Resset and reset are variant spellings of the same legal concept, not distinct offenses. Researchers encountering either form in historical Scots sources should treat them as interchangeable. Reset remains the recognized term in Scots criminal law scholarship; resset is an archaic variant that appears in older texts and transcriptions.
RESSET / ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT: The concepts overlap but are not identical. English common law distinguished between degrees of accessory liability with some procedural precision. Scots law's reset/resset was historically a broader category, focused on the act of harboring or concealing rather than on a strict taxonomy of principal and accessory.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical Scots law materials — particularly pre-nineteenth-century criminal records, legal commentaries, or literary sources with legal content — will encounter resset as a charge or legal reference. The spelling is unstable across sources: resset, reset, and occasionally ressett all appear.
Burrill's entry is notably sparse and cross-references Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (an antiquarian literary collection, not a law text), which signals how deeply this term is embedded in historical and folk legal culture rather than formal legal doctrine. Researchers should not treat the Scott citation as legal authority; it reflects the term's appearance in border ballads and oral tradition, where harboring outlaws was a culturally recognized act with a recognized legal name.
The jurisdictional boundary matters significantly here. Resset/reset belongs entirely to the Scots legal tradition. Do not attempt to map it directly onto English common law accessory doctrine or American receiving-stolen-property statutes — the conceptual lineage connects, but the procedural and evidentiary frameworks diverge. When researching cross-border cases in the Anglo-Scottish border context (a historically significant area for this very offense), researchers must be alert to which legal system's terminology and standards apply.
For researchers tracing the modern Scots law of reset, the Theft Act and subsequent Scottish criminal law reform materials are the appropriate sources. The term resset will not appear in modern statutory or case law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides only a brief entry, offering a functional definition (receipt or harboring of a felon; concealment of felony) and the specific compound "resset of thift" for theft-related concealment. The entry cross-references reset without elaborating on the distinction, suggesting Burrill treated resset as a variant spelling rather than a separate concept.
What Burrill does not supply — and what researchers should seek elsewhere — is any doctrinal depth: the mental element required (knowledge of the felony), the relationship between resset and the underlying offense, or the penalties applicable under historical Scots law. For that material, Hume's Commentaries on the Law of Scotland Respecting Crimes and Alison's Principles of the Criminal Law of Scotland are the standard historical authorities on Scots criminal law and address reset with considerably more analytical detail than Burrill.
The Scott's Minstrelsy citation in Burrill is an unusual move for a law dictionary — it points to the term's life outside formal legal texts and is useful for researchers tracing the social and cultural dimensions of the concept, but it carries no legal authority.
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Jurisdictional Note
Resset is exclusively a Scots law term. It has no direct counterpart in English common law nomenclature, though the underlying conduct — harboring felons and receiving stolen goods — was addressed by English law through separate doctrines. Researchers should not assume that historical Scots cases or charges translate cleanly into English legal categories.
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