Definition
A Latin term of medieval legal Latin (Law Latin), meaning to adjourn — that is, to postpone, defer, or continue a legal proceeding to another time or place. In older usage, the term also carried the meaning of to summon, directing a party to appear before a court at a specified future time.
The term appears in its variant forms ADJOURNARE and ADJURNARE throughout early English legal records and statutes.
Common Confusion
ADJORNARE should not be confused with the distinct Latin process term ADJOURNAMENTA (adjournments, as a plural or abstract noun referring to the act or record of adjournment) or with DIES DATUS (a day given), which was the formal procedural mechanism for continuing a case. In practice the concepts overlap — a DIES DATUS was often effectuated through an ADJORNARE — but they are analytically distinct, and researchers should not treat them as synonyms when reading plea roll entries.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering ADJORNARE in medieval or early modern legal records should be alert to its dual meaning. In later usage the term settled into the narrow sense of adjournment — deferring a proceeding. In earlier sources, however, the summoning sense dominated: the term could indicate that a party was being called to appear, not merely that a session was being postponed. Misreading the older sense as the later one can cause a researcher to mistake an original process for a continuance.
The term appears in Statute of Westminster II (13 Edw. I, c. 30), which provides the example cited by Burrill: adjornent assisas — they shall adjourn the assises. That statutory context concerns the authority of justices to defer assize proceedings, placing the term firmly in procedural rather than substantive law. Researchers working with assize records, eyre rolls, or early common law pleading records will encounter ADJORNARE most frequently in procedural postures: continuances, days given, and postponements noted on the plea roll.
Because the term is Latin form of the French ADJOURNER, researchers should cross-check both forms when searching manuscript or printed records. Printed abridgments and digests from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tend to use the anglicized ADJOURN; earlier Year Book material and statute rolls favor the Latin and French forms. Failing to search both language registers can produce incomplete results in corpus searches.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential entry, identifying ADJORNARE and its variants ADJOURNARE and ADJURNARE as Law Latin derived from the French ADJOURNER. Burrill notes both meanings — to adjourn and, in the older sense, to summon — and anchors the procedural usage to Statute of Westminster II, c. 30. The entry is brief but accurate in its scope.
No significant divergence among historical dictionaries is apparent from available sources, though the term is sufficiently archaic that many later law dictionaries omit it entirely in favor of the anglicized ADJOURN. The absence of extended treatment in later dictionaries reflects the term's retirement from active legal use by the early modern period, not any complexity or controversy about its meaning.