Definition
In Scots law, an action brought against persons who are "thirled" to a mill — that is, legally bound by the tenure condition known as thirlage to grind their grain at a designated mill — and who have failed to fulfill that obligation. The action of ures (also encountered as part of the phrase "multures and ures") allowed the mill owner or holder of the thirlage right to recover the tolls or dues (multures) owed for the grinding service, even when the thirled tenant had taken their grain elsewhere or ground it by other means.
The term is inseparable from the broader institution of thirlage, a feature of Scottish feudal land tenure under which tenants of an estate were compelled to use the estate's mill and to pay multures as a condition of their holding. Ures specifically names the legal remedy — the action or claim — rather than the underlying duty itself.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Third-person singular simple present indicative of the verb "ure" — a rare or archaic English verb meaning to accustom or to use habitually.
Historical common usage: No relevant entry in Webster's 1913 for "ures" as a standalone legal term.
The gap here is significant: the common-language form is a nearly obsolete verbal inflection with no apparent connection to mills or feudal tenure. A researcher encountering "ures" in a Scottish legal manuscript who reaches for a general dictionary will find nothing useful. The legal sense is entirely technical and jurisdiction-specific.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in Scots law sources — medieval and early modern charter material, feudal tenure records, baron court records, and institutional writings on Scottish land law. Researchers working in those sources should be aware of several traps:
First, "multures and ures" frequently appear as a paired phrase. Multures are the tolls themselves; ures is the action to recover them. Conflating the two — treating the phrase as redundant — will cause a researcher to miss the procedural dimension: ures signals that litigation is either contemplated or underway.
Second, thirlage was formally abolished in Scotland by the Thirlage Abolition Act 1799, which means that post-1800 Scots sources will reference ures only historically or in the context of pre-abolition disputes. Dating the document is therefore critical to understanding whether ures describes a live legal remedy or a historical one.
Third, Black's cites Bell — almost certainly George Joseph Bell's institutional writings or his dictionary of Scots law — as the authority. Researchers should trace citations through Bell's works rather than treating Black's entry as an independent source.
Finally, because thirlage was a creature of Scottish feudal tenure with no close English common law equivalent, English legal dictionaries (including most editions of Black's beyond the entry itself) will provide no meaningful support. Research must stay within the Scots law corpus.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive entry among the standard shelf sources. Its definition is terse but accurate: an action for multures against those thirled to a mill who have failed to grind there. The citation to Bell grounds the entry in recognized Scots institutional authority.
No comparable entry appears in English common law dictionaries, which is itself informative — ures is a term of art that never migrated into the broader Anglo-American legal vocabulary. This absence from Bouvier, Tomlin, and similar reference works confirms that the term's operative life was confined to Scotland and to the period before thirlage abolition.
The Wiktionary verbal sense ("third-person singular of ure") is historically attested in general Middle and Early Modern English, but there is no evidence that this usage influenced or intersected with the Scots legal term. The convergence appears to be coincidental.
Jurisdictional Note
Ures is a term of Scots law exclusively. It has no recognized equivalent in English, Welsh, Irish, or American legal systems. Following abolition of thirlage by statute in 1799, the action became obsolete as a live remedy in Scotland as well.