Sassine noun in Scots law, the act or procedure of giving possession of feudal property
‘“You’ll maybe know - maybe not - that your father made a deed of sassine before Culloden, to give over the place to Young Jamie…”’ (Drums of Autumn)
Modern travellers who ascend from Waverley Station onto Princes Street in Edinburgh are confronted on the opposite side of the road by the magnificent General Register Office, home of the National Records of Scotland and part of a complex of linked buildings that asserts the city’s status as the nation’s capital. Part of this complex is the Sasine Office, home of the General Register of Sasines, proudly described by its current custodians as: ‘the oldest national public land register in the world, dating back to 1617’. A sasine in Scots law is defined as the legal instrument by which the possession of property is proved. A citation from 1948 describes the process: ‘For over three centuries no one in Scotland has completed a valid title to land, either by succession, purchase, or any other method without recording a writ in the appropriate Register of Sasines’.
The word goes back a long way. It derives from Old French saisine, related to the verb saisir ‘seize, take’, and its earliest appearance in English dates from the end of the thirteenth century where it simply means ‘possession’. The word (spelt seisin) appears chiefly in phrases meaning ‘to have/take seisin (in, of)’, used later only in English law to mean ‘possession as of freehold’. The term is no longer current in English, unlike in Scotland where you can fill in an online ‘Sasine application form’, for instance.
References to sasine - with various spellings - are continuous from the thirteenth century onwards. Until 1845, the act of ‘taking sasine’ was expressed through what is described as: ‘the symbolical delivery of earth and stones or similar appropriate objects on the property itself’. Sometimes it seems more was required. A citation from 1686, for instance, records a decision noted in The Decisions of the Lords of Council and Session, the country’s principal law officers, that an unfortunate purchaser’s ‘sasine is null, bearing only the symbol of tradition of earth and stone, whereas a mill … requires delivery of the clap and happer’, a clap being an instrument used for striking or shaking a mill’s hopper (happer).