Definition
An archaic Anglo-Norman and Scots legal term denoting the seignorial power or right of a lord to hold jurisdiction over naifs (serfs born into bondage) or villeins, together with their offspring, suits, lands, goods, and chattels. The term signals a specific cluster of feudal entitlements flowing from a lord's dominion over unfree persons — control that was heritable, extended to the descendants of the serf, and encompassed both the person and the property of those subject to it.
In old Scots law, the term carried a closely related meaning: the power of having servants and slaves. Skene's De Verborum Significatione, a foundational Scots legal vocabulary, records this usage, making clear that the concept operated on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border, though with slight variation in its precise application.
Common Confusion
Thi is easily conflated with the closely related terms them and team, with which it was sometimes paired or treated as interchangeable in older records. Burrill notes that it was "otherwise written them and team." Researchers should treat all three terms as overlapping but potentially distinct grants in any given instrument: team referred broadly to the right of jurisdiction over one's own men in legal pleas; them (or thane) shaded into questions of personal status and lordship. When these terms appear together in a charter or feudal grant, they are typically read as reinforcing or expanding one another rather than duplicating the same right.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern records — medieval charters, feudal grants, manorial surveys, and early glossaries of Scots law. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should treat it as a marker of unfree tenure and seignorial jurisdiction rather than a standalone right with procedural content.
Several research traps apply. First, the term's spelling is highly variable: thi, thy, and thei all appear in historical sources, and indexing in older record compilations may be inconsistent. Second, because the term overlaps with them and team, a grant recorded as conferring "thi and team" is not redundant — each word carried freight, and courts and conveyancers of the period understood the pairing as deliberately comprehensive. Researchers analyzing the scope of a lord's powers under a particular instrument need to identify whether the grant is conjunctive or whether only one term appears.
Third, Scots legal usage diverges slightly from English usage. In English feudal law, the term connects most directly to villeinage doctrine and the legal treatment of naifs. In Scots law, Skene's gloss extends the concept toward something closer to the power over bound labor generally, which in the Scottish context had its own distinct procedural and tenure history. A source using Scots legal vocabulary should not be read through the lens of English villeinage law without verification.
Finally, this term belongs to a cluster of feudal jurisdictional words — sac, soc, toll, team, infangentheof, and their relatives — that appear together in Anglo-Saxon and early Norman grants. Understanding thi requires some familiarity with that broader vocabulary. Researchers unfamiliar with this cluster risk misreading the scope of rights conveyed.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal English-language legal dictionary source for this term. Burrill defines it as the power of having jurisdiction over naifs or villeins, with their suits or offspring, lands, goods, and chattels, citing Coke's Littleton (Co. Litt. 116a). He cross-references them and team, signaling that the term did not stand alone in legal practice.
Burrill also preserves the Scots usage via Skene's De Verborum Significatione, a sixteenth-century Scots legal glossary that remains a primary authority for archaic Scots legal terminology. That source defines thi as the power of having servants and slaves — a formulation that is blunter than the English villeinage framing and reflects the different conceptual vocabulary of Scots law.
No other major historical law dictionaries in the standard reference shelf (Jacob, Tomlins, Bouvier, Black) appear to carry this term as a main entry, which is itself informative: it marks thi as a term that had largely passed out of active legal use by the time those works were compiled and was already being treated as a historical curiosity rather than a working concept.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is historically specific to English and Scots feudal law. It has no modern operative meaning in any common law jurisdiction and appears only in historical research, archival work, and the interpretation of pre-modern land grants or charters. Scots usage, while parallel, diverges enough from English usage that researchers should consult Skene's glossary directly when working with Scottish sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Villeinage; Feudal Tenure; Serfdom and Bound Labor in Scots Law