Heriot
death-duty in late Anglo-Saxon England
Heriot, from Old English heregeat ("war-gear"), was originally a death-duty in late Anglo-Saxon England, which required that at death, a nobleman provided to his king a given set of military equipment, often including horses, swords, shields, spears and helmets. It later developed into a kind of tenurial feudal relief due from villeins. The equivalent term in French was droit du meilleur catel.
Etymology
The word derives from Old English here-geatwa, meaning the arms and equipment (geatwa) of a soldier or army (here).
History
An example of heriot was the right of a lord in feudal Europe to seize a serf's best horse, clothing, or both, upon his death. It arose from the tradition of the lord lending a serf a horse or armour or weapons to fight so that when the serf died the lord would rightfully reclaim his property. In England, heriot is first mentioned in the wills of West-Saxon nobles in the mid-tenth century, such as that of Æthelmær the Stout. Large bequests were made to the king, especially of war gear, in return for the king's permission to make a will and for his support in ensuring that the provisions of the will were carried out. The regulation of levels of heriot is the subject of a clause in Cnut's secular law-code (II Cnut § 71), drawn up between 1020 and 1023. The form of this duty depended on the rank of the nobleman (earl, king's thegn, median thegn) and on his region (Danelaw, Wessex).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Heriot” as death-duty in late Anglo-Saxon England. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as death-duty in late Anglo-Saxon England. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q3304653. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1020 and 1023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heriot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.