Definition
A Latin term of medieval English legal practice meaning to adjourn a matter to a succeeding term or to extend the time for payment of a debt. The word carried two closely related but distinct applications: (1) procedural — to postpone or adjourn a case or proceeding to a later court term; and (2) financial — to grant additional time for the satisfaction of a debt, effectively extending the payment deadline by agreement or judicial order.
Why It Matters in Research
ATTERMINARE is a term almost entirely confined to medieval and early modern English legal sources. Researchers will encounter it primarily in Bracton, in glossarial materials drawing on Statute of Westminster II (13 Edw. I, c. 4), and in the antiquarian dictionaries of Cowell and Blount. It does not survive into modern legal usage in any functional sense.
The chief research trap is conflating the two applications — procedural adjournment and debt extension — without recognizing that the context determines which meaning applies. In Bracton's usage, the procedural sense dominates: the term describes the act of adjourning parties before the king's justices at Westminster. In statutory and debt-related sources, the financial sense governs.
Researchers working in chancery records, plea rolls, or early common law procedure will find ATTERMINARE functioning as a synonym for what later sources call adjournment or continuance. However, its appearance in debt or credit contexts — particularly in materials touching on ecclesiastical or mercantile finance — signals the extension-of-payment sense, which connects to concepts like moratorium and forbearance as they developed in later equity practice.
Because the term appears almost exclusively in Latin-language records, researchers relying on translated abstracts or digests may lose it entirely; the procedural and financial senses are often paraphrased away without flagging the original term.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on two core meanings but vary in emphasis. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) lead with the debt-extension sense, citing Statute of Westminster II and the glossarists Cowell and Blount. Rapalje & Lawrence track the same definition closely, treating the procedural and financial senses as parallel without distinguishing priority between them.
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most technically detailed account, giving the Latin construction (from ad and terminus) and quoting directly from Bracton — both the procedural formula "adjourned before our justices at Westminster" (fol. 110) and the participial form ATTERMINATA at fol. 426, meaning "put to such a term." Burrill also preserves the phrase ATTERMINENT QUERENTES, indicating that plaintiffs themselves could effect the adjournment, which adds procedural nuance absent from the other dictionaries.
What the historical sources largely omit: any sustained treatment of the financial sense in practice — how debt extensions under this mechanism differed from simple forbearance, what judicial authority was required, and how the concept interacted with statutes merchant or ecclesiastical debt enforcement. Researchers needing that context must go beyond the dictionary shelf to the primary sources and secondary historical literature on medieval credit law.
Jurisdictional Note
ATTERMINARE is a term of Old English law with no equivalent adoption in American legal usage. Researchers encountering it in American sources will be reading either direct quotation from English authorities or antiquarian legal writing. It has no operative significance in any U.S. jurisdiction.