Definition
Adjournment in eyre is the formal appointment of a future date on which the justices in eyre intended to reconvene. It is the procedural mechanism by which the eyre — a circuit court of itinerant royal justices traveling through medieval English counties — suspended and rescheduled its sessions. The adjournment was not a dismissal of proceedings but a continuation, preserving the court's jurisdiction and the business before it until the appointed date.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical and antiquarian legal sources. Researchers will not encounter adjournment in eyre in modern case law or statutory materials. Its relevance is confined to scholarship on medieval English court structure, the history of the common law judiciary, and the development of circuit courts.
The key navigational point is context: the term cannot be understood in isolation from the eyre system itself. The justices in eyre held sweeping jurisdiction — criminal, civil, and fiscal — and their circuits could span years. An adjournment in eyre was therefore not a brief recess but could represent a substantial delay before the court returned to a given location. Researchers exploring the administrative and jurisdictional history of the eyre should treat this term as a procedural data point embedded within the larger institutional record.
Sources referencing this term — including Blackstone's Commentaries at 1 Bl. Com. 186, and the glossaries of Cowell and Spelman — treat it in passing as a minor procedural label rather than a term of sustained doctrinal significance. Its appearance in primary records (plea rolls, eyre rolls) would signal a formal suspension of sittings rather than the termination of a proceeding.
Researchers working with medieval English legal records should also be aware that the eyre system fell into disuse by the early fourteenth century, largely displaced by other itinerant commissions (nisi prius, oyer and terminer, gaol delivery). Adjournment in eyre, as a live procedural act, belongs to that pre-fourteenth-century window.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary offer identical one-sentence definitions, both tracing to the same pair of antiquarian sources: Cowell's legal glossary and Spelman's Glossarium. Bouvier adds a citation to Blackstone's Commentaries (1 Bl. Com. 186), which provides the most accessible secondary context for the eyre system generally.
The uniform brevity of both entries reflects the term's narrow, purely procedural character. Neither dictionary elaborates on the mechanism of the adjournment, the form it took in court records, or its practical consequences for litigants and counties — gaps that historical scholarship on the eyre (such as Stenton's and Crump's work on eyre records) must fill. The historical dictionaries treat the term as definitionally closed, and for dictionary purposes it is; the interpretive work belongs to the legal historian rather than the lexicographer.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Eyre; Justices in Eyre; Itinerant Justices