Definition
In Scots law, a resting place or field adjoining a drove road, used for stopping, resting, and refreshing sheep and cattle during overland transit. The term describes a recognized site associated with the movement of livestock along established drove routes — a practical legal concept governing rights of use tied to the road and its adjacent land. The stance was not merely incidental geography but a legally cognizable feature of the drove-road system, capable of being the subject of dispute, servitude, or property right.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The manner, pose, or posture in which one stands; one's opinion or point of view; a place to stand, a position or station; also, a place for buses or taxis to await passengers, or a location where a street trader conducts business.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A station; a position; a site. [Scot.] Also noted as an obsolete form of "stanza."
The Scottish colloquial meaning — a place to stand, a station or site — sits close to the legal meaning, and this is not coincidental. The legal term is a direct extension of this regional usage into property and transit law. The modern sense of "stance" as personal posture or opinion is entirely absent from the legal meaning. A researcher encountering the term in a Scots law context should resist any instinct to read it as metaphor or advocacy posture; it is a physical, locational concept.
Common Confusion
In contemporary legal writing, "stance" almost universally appears in its non-legal sense — a party's position, posture, or argument in litigation. This usage is colloquial and carries no formal legal definition. The dictionary meaning of stance as a Scots law term of art is entirely separate and should not be confused with this informal rhetorical usage. Researchers working in historical Scots law records and property disputes involving drove roads should treat stance as a technical term denoting a specific physical site and associated right of use, not a synonym for a party's legal position.
Why It Matters in Research
This term has an extremely narrow corpus footprint. It is a term of Scots law specifically, appearing in the context of drove-road rights and the transit of livestock. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in Scottish property law sources, historical agricultural law materials, and cases or treatises concerning servitudes and rights-of-way in Scotland.
The primary danger for researchers is overlooking the term entirely because it does not signal itself as legal vocabulary. In historical Scots documents, stance may appear without explanation, and a researcher unfamiliar with the drove-road system may misread it as a generic reference to a position or place. The connection to Bell's Appeal Cases — cited consistently across all historical dictionaries — makes that reporter a starting point for primary source research.
A secondary danger is the inverse: importing the modern colloquial legal usage (a party's "stance" in litigation) backward into historical sources where the word carries only the Scots law meaning. These two usages are historically and conceptually unrelated.
Researchers working in agrarian history, Highland land use, or Scottish servitude law will find this term relevant to questions about what rights attached to drove roads and who bore obligations with respect to stance lands.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: stance is a Scots law term meaning a resting place for cattle and sheep alongside a drove road, with all three citing 7 Bell's Appeal Cases 53, 57, 58 as authority. This uniformity reflects a narrow but settled definition — the term generated no doctrinal controversy and appears to have had a stable, geographically specific meaning.
Burrill adds useful texture by connecting stance to the broader concept of "to stand" (Latin stare; Law French estre), suggesting the word shares conceptual roots with the legal idea of submitting to or occupying a position — a connection that illuminates the etymology without altering the meaning. The phrase "to stand a trial" or "to stand to the order of a court" appears in Burrill in the same entry cluster, though these are distinct usages.
Rapalje & Lawrence does not offer a substantive entry for stance, the relevant portion of the source material appearing to be an index or cross-reference list rather than a definition. This gap does not diminish the definition but limits Rapalje's utility here.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the nature of the right or servitude attached to a stance — whether it was a property right, a customary right, or a right incident to the drove road itself — is left unexplored. Researchers needing to understand the legal character of stance rights will need to look beyond the dictionary definitions to Scots property law treatises and the Bell's cases directly.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to Scots law. It has no recognized equivalent in English common law, and no established meaning in American, Canadian, or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers working outside the Scottish legal tradition will not encounter this term as a term of art.