De Verborum Significatione: The Exposition of the Termes and..

1815. Ancient Scottish Legal Terms Skene, John [1543?-1617]. De Verborum Significatione: The Exposition of the Termes and Difficill Wordes, Conteined in the Foure Buikes of Regiam Majestatem, and Uthers, In the Acts of Parliament, Infestments; And Used in Practique of this Realme; With Divers Rules, and Common Places, Or Principalles of the Lawes. 1681. [Edinburgh: Alexander Smellie, Printer, c.1815]. [iii], 4-146 pp. Octavo (8-1/2" x 5"). Modern quarter calf over cloth, blind fillets and lettering piece to spine, endpapers renewed. Some toning, offsetting to margins of preliminaries, negligible foxing in a few places, chips to heads of a few leaves with no loss to text. Later owner annotation to front endleaf, later stamp (of Sandeman Library Perth) to title page, interior otherwise clean. $200. * With side-notes. A useful reprint of this scarce seventeenth-century dictionary of legal terms in the Scottish dialect. Also published as an appendix to Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland, this edition of Skene's dictionary reprints the text of the 1681 edition issued in Edinburgh by David Lindsay. Skene, a Scottish jurist and legal historian, is best known for his magisterial compilation The Lawes and Actes of Parliament Maid be King James the First and His Successors, Kings of Scotland (1597). The present volume, which was first published as an appendix to the Lawes and Actes, is a dictionary of ancient Scottish legal terms. Sweet & Maxwell, A Legal Bibliography of the British Commonwealth 5:105.