Definition
A cutting weapon referenced in medieval European legal texts, particularly in the laws of the Visigoths. The term appears in late Latin legal sources as a designation for a bladed or edged instrument, classified among the regulated weapons of early Germanic law codes.
Why It Matters in Research
SCRAMA is a term of purely historical and antiquarian significance. Researchers will encounter it only when working in early medieval legal sources, particularly the Lex Visigothorum (Law of the Visigoths), a seventh-century Iberian Germanic law code. Its appearance in Burrill signals the depth of that dictionary's coverage of archaic and Continental European legal vocabulary — coverage that modern legal dictionaries entirely omit.
The term has no living legal application. Its research value lies in two narrow contexts: (1) historians and legal scholars tracing the regulation of weapons under early Germanic law, where categories of arms carried specific penalties and liability rules; and (2) researchers using Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum or comparable glossaries of medieval Latin legal terminology, where SCRAMA and cognate terms appear as classified weapon types.
Researchers working in Anglo-Saxon or broader early medieval legal history should be aware that weapon terminology in these sources is highly specific and often untranslatable by modern dictionaries. A term that appears to be a generic noun may, in its original legal context, carry precise classificatory weight — determining, for instance, whether an injury was treated as caused by a regulated weapon and what legal consequences followed. Burrill's citation to Spelman is a useful pointer: Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum remains one of the few reference works to systematically address this stratum of legal Latin.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary entry located for this term in the Law Mind corpus. The entry is brief: "L. Lat. In old European law. A kind of cutting weapon. L. Wisigoth. lib. 9, tit. 2, 1. 9. Spelman." It does nothing more than identify the term, classify it, and point to its source — the Leges Visigothorum, Book 9, Title 2, and Spelman's glossary. No definition of the weapon's precise form (blade length, construction, or use) is offered, and Burrill makes no attempt to connect the term to any broader legal principle.
This is consistent with Burrill's handling of archaic Continental terms generally: the dictionary catalogs them for completeness rather than for practical utility to practitioners of his era. Researchers should not expect Burrill to resolve interpretive questions about such terms; it functions here as an index pointer rather than an authority.
No entry for SCRAMA appears in Black's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or other standard American legal dictionaries in the corpus, which is unsurprising given the term's purely historical and non-English provenance.