Definition
The act by which a lord takes possession of the heriot owed upon the death of a tenant. A heriot was a feudal death duty requiring the tenant's family to surrender to the lord the best beast (or, in some arrangements, the best chattel) belonging to the deceased tenant at the time of death. The seizing of heriots was the lord's self-help remedy for collecting this due — a physical act of taking, not a judicial proceeding — executed as a matter of customary right incident to the tenure relationship.
Common Confusion
Seizing of heriots should not be confused with the heriot itself. The heriot is the obligation or the thing owed; the seizing is the act of enforcing and collecting that obligation. The distinction matters in historical sources because legal writers sometimes use "heriot" loosely to refer to both the duty and the act of taking.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs firmly to the feudal tenure system of English land law and has no operative significance in modern American or post-feudal English law. Researchers will encounter it exclusively in historical sources: English common law treatises, manorial court records, and early Anglo-American land tenure materials. Blackstone's Commentaries at 2 Bl. Comm. 422 is the locus classicus, and the historical dictionaries simply reproduce that reference.
The key research trap is treating the seizing of heriots as a distinct legal action or writ. It was not. It was a self-help remedy, not a form of action. If a lord wrongfully seized a heriot — taking the wrong beast, or seizing where no heriot was actually due — the tenant's family had recourse through the common law courts, but the seizing itself was extrajudicial. Researchers looking for litigation around heriots should search for actions of replevin or detinue in early court records, not for a writ of "seizing of heriots."
There is also a distinction in the underlying obligation that affects what could be seized: heriot service (arising from the tenure itself, enforceable in the lord's courts) differed from heriot custom (arising from copyhold custom of the manor). This distinction shaped what remedies were available and is underexplored in the historical dictionaries.
American legal researchers will find the term almost exclusively in early colonial land grant records influenced by English tenure forms, in academic treatments of feudal property law, and occasionally in title examination involving properties with historical manor connections in states like Maryland and Virginia, where manorial tenure was introduced in early colonial charters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this entry — all three define it identically as the taking of the best beast where an heriot is due on the death of the tenant, and all three cite 2 Bl. Comm. 422 as their sole authority. This uniformity reflects the term's narrow and settled character: by the time these dictionaries were compiled, the seizing of heriots was already a matter of pure legal history rather than live doctrine.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural mechanics of seizure, the distinction between heriot service and heriot custom, or the consequences of wrongful seizure. Researchers requiring depth beyond the bare definition must go directly to Blackstone and to the feudal tenure treatises — Littleton's Tenures and Coke upon Littleton remain the primary sources for the substantive law underlying the act.
Jurisdictional Note
This concept is specific to English common law and has no living application in any U.S. or modern English jurisdiction. The Tenures Abolition Act 1660 substantially dismantled the feudal tenure framework in England, and heriot-related obligations were progressively extinguished thereafter. American jurisdictions never received heriot obligations as operative law, though early colonial instruments in certain proprietary colonies referenced them nominally.