Man given 18-month sentence for ancient offence of hamesucken

The court heard that Graeme Bryden, who was 27 at the time of the offence, broke into the home of the woman in Stevenston in the early hours of 25 June 2015.

He woke her by pressing his hand over her face and demanding money. He then took her handbag from the bedroom floor as she tried to follow him.

The next day, after a search of the local area near the property, police recovered a number of items which were identified as belonging to the woman and DNA retrieved from one of those items led to the arrest of Bryden.

Speaking to Scottish Legal News, John W. Cairns, professor of civil law at the University of Edinburgh explained the offence when Mr Bryden first appeared in court last year.

He said: “Hamesucken is a word of Germanic origin. The term came into Scottish legal usage through Anglo-Saxon: “Hamsocn”. In Danish it is: “hjemsøge”: in modern German: “heimsuchen”.

“The offence is that of pursuing someone into their home to assault them. It was once a capital offence (the medieval law-book Regiam majestatem said it was to be punished as was the ravishing of women, that is as a capital offence); by the eighteenth century, the Crown usually, but not always, only sought a non-capital punishment, though individuals were still sometimes hanged for it. There were similar offences with similar names in other northern European countries.”

Professor Cairns added: “It was punished severely, because of its implications for preservation of the peace in a country of the blood-feud.

“When, in 1887, Scots criminal procedure no longer required the libelling of a “nomen juris” in an indictment, the term might have been expected to fall out of use, particularly when the death penalty in 1887 became restricted to murder. It is effectively in modern terms an aggravated assault, aggravated as to place.

“Of course, it still resonates as a term, because individuals like to feel secure in their own home, and invasion of one’s home seems particularly heinous. It is still sometimes mentioned to add a special feeling of moral wrongness to an offence, with the courts still using the term from time to time: HMA v Brown (1989); McAdam v Ingram (1990), to give just two examples.”