> as lemmas

8. Chiefly Scots Law. A feudal privilege of trial or punishment involving a water-filled pit or waterhole (see note). In later use: the feudal right to imprison criminals (historical). Chiefly in pit and gallows: the right to exercise the privilege of pit and to sentence criminals to the gallows. Now historical. [Compare post-classical Latin fossa (a1124 in this sense in a Scottish legal source). The phrase pit and gallows corresponds to post-classical Latin furca et fossa in Scottish legal sources:

?a1153 Sc. Acts David I c. 13 in Scot. Stat. (1844) I. 319 [red] Omnes barones qui habent furcam et fossam de latrocinio.

Both the Latin and the English terms denote a feudal privilege of trial or punishment. Since they often occur in comprehensive lists of such rights, it can be difficult to pin down exactly which right is denoted by pit or, respectively, fossa .

Where Latin fossa is unambiguous in medieval sources (e.g. Gervase of Canterbury), it denotes the trial by ordeal of water, i.e. by being thrust into a pit filled with water (compare sense 2).

Antiquaries and historians from the 17th cent. onwards have taken furca et fossa to refer to the legal practice of sentencing women to death by drowning (in a pit or fossa ) and men to death by hanging (furca ), a practice (implicitly) documented for Anglo-Saxon England in the following Latin version of a (lost) passage from the 10th-cent. Old English Laws of Æðelstan: c1114 Quadripartitus in F. Liebermann Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1903) I. 172 Si libera mulier sit, precipitetur de cliuo uel submergatur. [If it be a free woman, let her be thrown off a cliff or drowned.]There is apparently no clear evidence that this practice continued after the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, nor that the words fossa or pit were applied to it in the later Middle Ages.

However, Dutch put is also applied to a type of capital punishment, and occurs chiefly in a phrase parallel to pit and gallows : Middle Dutch, early modern Dutch put the punishment of being buried alive, the right to bury alive, Middle Dutch, early modern Dutch put ende galge the punishment of being buried alive and hanged, the right to bury alive and hang, the right to sentence to death. Elsewhere on the continent both types of capital punishment for female felons seem to have been known (compare J. Grimm Deutsche Rechts-Altertümer (1899) II. 264, where a number of German and Swedish sources are cited).

In later use, pit in the phrase pit and gallows apparently came to be reinterpreted as showing sense 5c, i.e. as a baronial privilege of imprisonment (compare quot. 1988).]