Definition
A corrupted or misprinted word appearing in the medieval legal treatise Fleta, now understood to be a scribal or typographical error for HOMSOKNE (also spelled HAMSOKNE). The term has no independent legal meaning and is significant only as a bibliographic artifact of early printed legal texts. See HOMSOKNE for the substantive definition.
Common Confusion
SEHOMSOKNE should not be treated as a synonym, variant spelling, or archaic form of HOMSOKNE carrying independent authority. It is an error, not a parallel usage. The intermediate correction SAHOMSOKNE (the errata form) is similarly not an independently attested legal term — it is simply the corrected reading from the same errata page, and still regarded by Burrill as likely resolving to HOMSOKNE. Researchers should anchor all substantive research to HOMSOKNE or HAMSOKNE and treat both SEHOMSOKNE and SAHOMSOKNE as bibliographic waypoints only.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering SEHOMSOKNE in a transcription or index of Fleta should treat it as a variant form pointing to HOMSOKNE, not as a distinct legal concept. The errata to the 1647 edition of Fleta corrects the word to SAHOMSOKNE, which is itself likely a further corruption of HOMSOKNE or HAMSOKNE. This is a classic instance of print-era error propagation: a compositor's mistake in an early edition enters the scholarly record, gets indexed, and can mislead researchers who encounter the term in secondary sources or word lists without the accompanying errata.
The practical trap is obvious — if searching a corpus for variations of HAMSOKNE, the form SEHOMSOKNE may or may not appear depending on whether the indexer followed the errata. Researchers working with early printed editions of Fleta, or with any secondary source that relied on the uncorrected 1647 text, should check whether the errata corrections were incorporated before drawing conclusions about word usage or doctrinal content.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only historical shelf source to record this form, and Burrill is admirably candid about its status: he identifies it as a word in Fleta, notes that the 1647 errata corrects it to SAHOMSOKNE, and concludes from context that it is a misprint for HOMSOKNE or HAMSOKNE. Burrill neither assigns the word independent meaning nor speculates beyond what the text supports. No other standard historical legal dictionary — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Jacob's — appears to carry this form, which confirms that it never achieved standing as a recognized legal term. Its sole documentary life is in Fleta, lib. 1, c. 34, § 8, and in Burrill's entry flagging the error.