ADJURNARE

Definition

Adjurnare is a Latin term of medieval European law meaning to assign a day to a person, or to summon someone to appear before a court on a specific day. The act combined two functions: (1) the calendaring act of designating a date, and (2) the compulsory act of requiring appearance — roughly equivalent to what modern practice separates into scheduling and service of process. A person subjected to adjurnare was called adjurnatus, meaning one summoned or called to a certain day.

Why It Matters in Research

This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern sources and will surface when researching early English and continental European procedural law, feudal court practice, or the Latin vocabulary of medieval writs. Researchers working in colonial American legal records, early common law pleading manuals, or annotated editions of Bracton or Fleta may encounter adjurnare in descriptions of how courts commanded appearance before modern summons procedure was codified. The term is a marker of procedural antiquity. When it appears in a source, it signals you are dealing with a period when the distinction between notifying a party and compelling their presence was conceptually blurred — both functions were collapsed into the single act of assigning the day. Modern researchers should not read backward from contemporary distinctions between notice and compulsion when interpreting passages that use adjurnare. Burrill links adjurnare to the Saxon andagan (to put to a day), which is useful context when tracing the Anglo-Saxon roots of English court procedure. The parallel Latin formulation diem alicui dicere — literally "to say a day to someone" — appears in Roman-influenced sources and may serve as a cross-reference point in comparative legal history research.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary historical source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill identifies the term's French origin (adjourner) and provides both the Latin equivalents (diem alicui dicere; citare, in jus vocare) and the Saxon cognate (andagan), drawing on Spelman's Glossarium and Skene's De Verborum Significatione. This layered etymological support is characteristic of Burrill's approach to Latinate procedural terms and reflects the mid-nineteenth century scholarly effort to systematize the vocabulary of English legal history. No other corpus dictionary develops this term further. The entry's brevity in Burrill is itself informative: by the time of Burrill's writing, adjurnare had no live procedural role and was being documented as a historical artifact rather than a working term. Researchers should treat it accordingly — as evidence of how courts operated, not as a term requiring doctrinal analysis. Note: The Burrill entry contains a stray sentence referring to the abolition of a writ in New York and the use of "admeasurement of dower" — this appears to be a transcription artifact from a nearby entry and does not relate to adjurnare.

Jurisdictional Note

Adjurnare has no modern jurisdictional application. Its historical use was pan-European, appearing in both English common law sources and continental civil law contexts shaped by Roman procedure. English and Scottish sources (Spelman; Skene) both reference the term, suggesting it was part of the shared Latin vocabulary of medieval legal administration across the British Isles.

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