Definition
ANNALES (Latin). A term with two distinct meanings in historical legal usage:
1. Year Books. The Latin title formerly applied to the Year Books — the series of anonymously reported English court decisions compiled from roughly the late thirteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. As "annales" simply means "annuals" or yearly records, the term was a natural label for these year-by-year reports of judicial proceedings in the common law courts.
2. Yearling cattle. In old English records, annales referred to cattle in their first year of life — yearlings. This usage appears in administrative and estate documents, particularly those concerned with livestock valuation, manorial accounts, and similar agrarian record-keeping.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Annals" — historical records arranged in yearly sequence; chronicles of events year by year.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Annals" — a relation of events in chronological order, each event being recorded under the year in which it occurred; a historical record generally.
The common meaning tracks closely with the first legal meaning and requires little translation. The second legal meaning — yearling cattle — has no counterpart in ordinary English usage of "annals" and would be entirely opaque to a researcher encountering it in an old manorial or estate document without specific guidance.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The term encompasses two functionally unrelated categories that share only their Latin root:
— Annales as legal reports: Synonymous with the Year Books, the foundational source material of medieval English common law.
— Annales as livestock: A term of agricultural and estate administration, appearing in inventories, surveys, and accounts rather than in court records.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research significance of annales lies in its identification with the Year Books. Researchers working in pre-modern English legal history will encounter the term as a label for the Year Books in Latin-language scholarly commentary, in older treatises, and in secondary sources drawing on continental or Latinate legal scholarship. Knowing that annales and Year Books are the same thing prevents confusion when moving between sources that use one label versus the other.
The livestock meaning creates a specific document-type trap. A researcher reading through manorial court rolls, estate inventories, or early chancery proceedings may encounter annales in a context that has nothing to do with legal reports. Misreading annales as a reference to the Year Books in an agricultural inventory would be a significant interpretive error. The two meanings are contextually distinguishable — legal proceedings versus estate and husbandry records — but the distinction is not always immediately obvious in fragmentary or damaged documents.
No modern jurisdictional variation is relevant. Both meanings are purely historical and English in origin.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement. All four record both meanings — the Year Books identification and the yearling cattle definition — in nearly identical language, suggesting the entries derive from a common ancestor. Burrill adds a citation to the London Legal Observer (9 Lond. Legal Obs. 323) for the Year Books meaning and traces the cattle definition to Cowell, a reference shared by the other dictionaries. Bouvier cites Burrill directly rather than Cowell, indicating a chain of transmission rather than independent verification.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any discussion of how widely annales was actually used as a title for the Year Books in practice, or in what period the term was current. The Year Books themselves are more commonly encountered under their English name in modern legal historical scholarship, and the Latin label annales appears more often in older treatises and commentary than in the Year Books themselves. Researchers should not expect to find the Year Books shelved or indexed under "annales" in most modern library or archival settings.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Year Books