Definition
An archaic Latin term from old English law meaning to take, or to take possession; to seize or vest property into someone's hand. The term appears in medieval legal texts as a verb form describing the act by which a lord, officer, or sovereign physically assumed or resumed control of land or goods — the operative act underlying the broader doctrine of seisin. The phrase *seysire in manum suum* means specifically to seize or take into one's own hand, denoting the manual, physical character of the possessory act.
Common Confusion
SEYSIRE should not be confused with the noun SEISIN (or seisina), which describes the state or condition of lawful possession once established. SEYSIRE is the act; seisin is the result. Similarly, researchers may encounter SEIZE in its modern legal sense (as in seizure of property by government authority), which carries enforcement connotations absent from the older feudal usage of seysire.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval English legal manuscripts and Bracton-era treatises. Researchers consulting Bracton's *De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae* — the primary source cited in Burrill — will encounter seysire in discussions of how seisin was acquired or resumed, particularly in contexts of escheat, wardship, or forfeiture to the Crown. The term is not a living legal word; it survives only in primary sources from roughly the twelfth through fourteenth centuries.
The research trap here is terminological drift. Later abridgments and digests often silently translate seysire into the English "seize" or "take into hand" without flagging the feudal-possessory context. A researcher reading a secondary source that says land was "seized" into the king's hand may be looking at a translation of seysire, carrying a meaning quite different from modern governmental seizure or attachment. The physical, symbolic dimension of the act — the placing of land into one's hand as a legal ceremony — matters for understanding the feudal record.
Corpus researchers tracing the development of seisin doctrine, disseisin, or the assize of novel disseisin should treat seysire as a procedural antecedent concept: understanding it clarifies why seisin was treated as a fact requiring physical completion, not merely agreement or entitlement.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole surviving entry in the Law Mind shelf corpus. Burrill correctly identifies the term as Latin, old English in provenance, and glosses it as "to take; to take possession; to seise," citing Bracton folio 71b. The entry is brief but accurate.
What Burrill does not develop is the doctrinal weight of the act described. Seysire in the Bractonian context was not a casual synonym for possession — it was the physical, legally operative gesture by which feudal rights were transferred or reclaimed. The act of taking into hand (*in manum suum*) reflected a legal culture in which possession was completed through bodily ceremony, not paperwork. Other historical dictionaries on the Law Mind shelf, including Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's Law Dictionary, do not carry entries for seysire, leaving Burrill as the authoritative reference point within the corpus for this term.
Jurisdictional Note
Seysire is confined to medieval English common law and has no equivalent use or survival in American law. Researchers working in Scottish, Norman, or continental feudal records may encounter parallel terms but should not assume terminological identity with the English usage.