Definition
A Latin term appearing in old English legal records meaning to pay scot, tax, or customary dues. The verb describes the act of discharging a periodic financial obligation owed to a lord, parish, municipality, or other authority — the kind of communal levy known as "scot." In medieval and early modern English practice, failure to scottare could affect a person's standing in a borough or parish community, including eligibility for certain rights or freedoms.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry for "scottare" in modern English. The term is obsolete as general vocabulary.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The related noun "scot" appears in older English as a share of a reckoning or a local tax, surviving in the common phrase "scot and lot."
Editorial note: Because "scottare" has no meaningful presence in common English at any period, readers encountering it will find no familiar reference point. It is purely a term of historical legal record, and its meaning must be reconstructed from the Latin legal vocabulary of medieval English administration.
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Common Confusion
SCOTTARE vs. SCOT AND LOT: "Scottare" is the verbal act of paying a customary tax; "scot and lot" is a compound phrase describing the full bundle of local dues and customary obligations — and, later, a qualification for the Parliamentary borough franchise. The two are historically connected but functionally distinct. Using one as a shorthand for the other distorts both the documentary record and the legal history.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter "scottare" almost exclusively in transcriptions of old English borough records, manorial accounts, and medieval legal instruments — particularly those printed in Latin or Law Latin. Its appearance signals a document touching on local taxation, customary tenure, or the obligations of burgess or parish membership.
Several practical traps attend this term. First, the spelling is inconsistent across historical records: variant forms appear without the double "t," with prefix variations, or abbreviated. Researchers searching digitized sources for a single spelling may miss relevant documents. Second, the term is easily confused with the noun "scot" and the paired phrase "scot and lot," which has its own distinct legal history as a qualification for borough franchise. The verb form "scottare" describes the act of payment; "scot" names the levy itself; "scot and lot" describes a bundle of customary obligations tied to local civic rights. These are related but not interchangeable. Third, because the word appears almost entirely in Latin records predating the dominance of English in legal proceedings, it tends to cluster in document types — pipe rolls, borough charters, manorial surveys — that require paleographic skill to access and that are underrepresented in full-text search tools.
Within the Law Mind corpus, "scottare" functions as a pointer toward the broader conceptual cluster of local fiscal obligation and customary tenure. A researcher tracing the history of local taxation, municipal franchise qualifications, or the scot-and-lot franchise will find it an early data point in a long doctrinal lineage running from medieval custom through the Parliamentary franchise debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree precisely on the core definition: to pay scot, tax, or customary dues. Each traces the term to Cowell's Interpreter, the early seventeenth-century legal glossary that remains the acknowledged authority for Law Latin terms of this kind. This uniformity reflects the term's antiquity and the narrow documentary base from which it is known — the dictionaries are not independently confirming the definition so much as transmitting Cowell's account.
Burrill adds the useful specification that the term appears in "old records" and classifies it as Latin ("L. Lat."), which is the appropriate designation for the hybrid Latin of medieval English legal instruments. This is more than a pedantic distinction: it signals that the word belongs to a specialized documentary register, not to classical or ecclesiastical Latin, and researchers should expect to find it in administrative rather than learned texts.
Black's 2nd edition appends entries for "Scoundrel" and other terms immediately following "Scottare," a formatting artifact of alphabetical compression in that edition. Researchers should not read any substantive connection between those entries.
No source dictionary elaborates on the procedural consequences of failing to scottare, the documentary forms in which the obligation was recorded, or the historical relationship between scottare and the scot-and-lot franchise. These gaps are significant. For that context, researchers must go beyond the dictionary shelf to primary sources and specialist historical scholarship on medieval borough administration.
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