Definition
Latin: "years and terms." An early collective title applied to the Year Books — the series of medieval English law reports documenting judicial proceedings, arguments, and decisions in the royal courts, compiled annually across the regnal years of English kings from roughly the late thirteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. The phrase captures the organizing principle of the Year Books themselves: reports arranged first by the year of the monarch's reign and then by the legal term (Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter, Trinity) in which the proceedings occurred.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in older legal bibliographies, catalogues, or treatise footnotes should recognize it as a bibliographic descriptor, not a doctrinal concept. It functions as a period label for the Year Books as a corpus rather than as a term of art carrying substantive legal meaning.
The practical navigational point is this: the Year Books themselves are cited in historical sources under multiple conventions — by regnal year, by term, by monarch's name, or under collective titles such as "anni et tempora." A researcher tracing a medieval English common law citation who encounters this phrase is looking at a reference to the Year Book series as a whole or to a catalogue entry for it. The phrase appears in older legal bibliographies and commentary on English legal sources precisely because early printers and bibliographers needed a label for the accumulated annual volumes before modern standardized citation systems existed.
Because the Year Books predate systematic law reporting, the annotations and headnotes applied by later editors and cataloguers — including the use of "anni et tempora" — vary across printed editions. Researchers using Law Mind sources should cross-check bibliographic references carefully: the same Year Book material may appear under different organizational labels depending on which printed edition or catalogue a historical source is drawing from.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (first and second editions) and Burrill's — are in complete agreement: three words of definition, nothing more. Burrill adds the citation to the London Legal Observer (9 Lond. Leg. Obs. 323), which is the sole primary pointer in the dictionary literature and provides modest bibliographic grounding. None of the dictionaries explain the Year Books themselves, their history, or why this title was applied, treating the phrase as self-evident to the expected readership of practicing lawyers familiar with English legal history.
The brevity of these entries reflects the term's nature: it is a bibliographic artifact, not a doctrinal concept requiring analysis. Historical dictionaries that were written for practitioners already steeped in common law tradition had no occasion to elaborate. Modern researchers less familiar with the Year Books as a source category will need to supplement these entries with secondary material on English legal bibliography to use them effectively.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Year Books; English Common Law Sources; Legal Bibliography and Citation History.