Definition
An old Scots law term for a formal roll or register containing the particular dittay — that is, the specific criminal charges or indictment — drawn up against malefactors. The traistis was prepared by the justice clerk and delivered, together with the porteous (the official list of accused persons), to the coroner. Its purpose was to authorize the coroner to attach — that is, to arrest or summon — the persons named in the porteous in accordance with the charges set out in the traistis. The name derives from the Scots word for trust: the document was committed to the trust, faith, and credit of the clerks and coroner responsible for its custody and execution.
The traistis functioned, in essence, as the documentary bridge between a criminal accusation and the physical apprehension of the accused. It gave legal grounding and specific content to the arrest process by ensuring the coroner acted on a defined, clerk-certified statement of charges rather than on an informal or oral accusation.
Common Confusion
The traistis is closely associated with two companion documents — the dittay and the porteous — and the three are easily conflated because they traveled together and served interlocking functions. The dittay was the substantive criminal charge itself. The porteous was the list of accused persons. The traistis was the roll that compiled and formalized the dittay for delivery to the coroner. A researcher encountering any one of these terms in a historical Scots legal source should expect the others to appear nearby; confusing them will distort understanding of the procedural sequence.
Why It Matters in Research
Traistis is a term of exclusively historical Scots criminal procedure. No modern equivalent exists under that name, and the procedural apparatus it describes — justice clerk, coroner, porteous, dittay — belongs to a system of criminal justice that predates the reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers will encounter this term only in early Scots legal records, historical treatises on Scots law, or glossaries of old Scottish legal terminology.
The primary research trap is treating traistis as interchangeable with either the dittay or the porteous. Each served a distinct procedural role, and precision matters when reconstructing the sequence of criminal proceedings in historical Scots courts. The traistis is specifically the instrument of transmission and authorization — it moved the charge from the court's records into the coroner's hands and gave him authority to act.
Because this term appears in no modern jurisdiction and has no active legal meaning, corpus researchers should treat it as a marker of period and place: its presence in a document reliably signals old Scots criminal procedure, likely pre-eighteenth century. It will not appear in English common law sources, civil law sources, or any modern legal system.
For researchers working with Burrill's entry specifically: the surviving text of the Burrill definition is garbled in available sources, cutting off mid-sentence and trailing into what appears to be content belonging to a different entry (referencing Calv. Lex. and Dig. 2.15, which concern compromise or settlement, not criminal rolls). This splice is an artifact of the dictionary's compilation and should not be read as substantive content about the traistis itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Burrill's — are in close agreement on the core definition. The substance is consistent: the traistis is a criminal roll delivered by the justice clerk to the coroner, paired with the porteous, containing the dittay against malefactors. The etymological grounding in "traist" (trust) is noted in both Black's editions and provides useful confirmation that the term's meaning was understood as custodial and fiduciary in character — the coroner held the document in trust as authority for his actions.
Burrill's entry adds the citation to Calvini Lexicon Iuridicum, a standard reference for old Scots and civil law terminology, which is the expected scholarly apparatus for a term of this vintage. However, as noted above, the Burrill text as preserved appears to conflate this entry with another, and the trailing references to Digest 2.15 and Fleta should be treated with caution — they do not appear to relate to the traistis.
No historical dictionary source assigns this term to any jurisdiction other than Scotland, and none suggests it survived into modern practice. Historical sources are consistent in labeling it "old Scots law," signaling even to contemporary readers that it was already archaic.
Jurisdictional Note
Traistis is exclusively a term of old Scots law. It has no counterpart in English common law, no civilian equivalent under that name, and no modern application in any jurisdiction. Research into this term is necessarily research into pre-modern Scottish criminal procedure.