Definition
Sien is an obsolete legal term with two distinct recorded meanings depending on the source tradition. In English legal usage derived from Law French, sien means offspring or descendant — an archaic spelling of "scion." In a separate Law French sense recorded by Burrill, sien means seat or place of residence. Neither meaning remains in active use; the term survives only in historical legal texts and older property or family law instruments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete spelling of scion.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded as a standard English entry; scion appears as the standard form, meaning a shoot or twig of a plant, or a descendant of a family.
The legal usage of sien tracks the common meaning of scion as descendant, but the additional Law French sense of seat or residence has no counterpart in ordinary English. Researchers encountering sien in a historical document must determine from context which sense applies — a descendant, or a domicile or holding.
Common Confusion
Two independent meanings collapse under one spelling. Burrill's entry (drawing on Kelham's glossary of Law French) records sien as meaning seat — a sense unrelated to lineage. Black's in both editions records sien exclusively as offspring or descendant. These are not competing definitions of the same concept; they are homographs from the same Law French root tradition that diverged in recorded legal usage. A researcher reading sien in a feudal land instrument should not assume the term refers to lineage, and vice versa when reading a succession document.
Why It Matters in Research
Sien is a term that will surface rarely and almost exclusively in transcriptions or digests of medieval or early modern English legal materials. Its research significance is navigational rather than substantive.
First, spelling instability is the central trap. Law French terms were transcribed inconsistently by English legal scribes, and sien, scion, scyon, and related variants may appear interchangeably across manuscript sources and early printed abridgments. A corpus search for sien alone will miss variant spellings; researchers should run parallel searches.
Second, Burrill's gloss — sien as seat — points toward a distinct feudal and territorial usage. The authority Burrill cites is Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), a specialist Law French glossary not widely held. When sien appears in land tenure contexts alongside terms like fee, manor, or demesne, the seat meaning is the more probable reading.
Third, the Coke citation in Black's (Co. Litt. 123a) anchors the descendant sense to Coke upon Littleton, one of the most cited authorities in early common law property doctrine. That citation gives researchers a direct path to the doctrinal context in which sien-as-offspring appeared in legal argument.
Neither meaning is operationally significant in modern practice. The term is relevant to researchers working in legal history, genealogical instrument interpretation, or the history of property law, particularly descent and inheritance rules in the common law before the nineteenth-century reforms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) is consistent: sien means offspring or descendant, with a citation to Co. Litt. 123a. The definition is minimal and the editions do not diverge in substance — the second edition's citation to "1234a" appears to be a typographical error for 123a, the standard folio reference in Coke upon Littleton.
Burrill diverges entirely, recording the Law French sense of seat on the authority of Kelham. Burrill's dictionary is generally more attentive to Law French and Norman legal vocabulary than Black's, and this entry reflects that. Neither source acknowledges the other's meaning, suggesting the editors drew from separate documentary traditions.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: neither source explains how to distinguish the two senses in practice, nor do they note the spelling variation problem. Researchers should treat these as two separate lexical entries that happen to share a headword.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Descent and Distribution (historical); Law French in English Legal Sources.