Definition
A formal administrative record maintained by a sheriff or jailer listing all prisoners currently held in custody, together with a marginal notation of the judgment or legal process under which each prisoner is confined. The calendar served as the official account of the jail's population and was used by courts to verify the basis of each prisoner's detention.
The instrument was primarily a tool of English practice, generated and kept by the sheriff as a matter of administrative duty. At assizes and gaol deliveries, the calendar was presented to the judges to inform them of the prisoners awaiting trial or already sentenced, so that the court could proceed systematically through the docket of detained persons.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a historical term of English practice. Researchers encountering it in early American materials should understand they are reading either a direct import of English procedural terminology or, in some colonies and early states, a close functional analog adopted by local sheriffs.
The term appears most naturally in sources concerning gaol delivery, the assize system, and pre-trial detention practices. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should be alert to two things: first, the calendar of prisoners is a distinct instrument from a court docket or trial calendar — it records custody status, not case scheduling; second, as American jurisdictions developed their own administrative forms after independence, the term largely fell away from formal use, replaced by jail registers, commitment records, and booking logs, though the underlying function persisted.
The marginal notation of judgments is a detail worth noting. In early practice, the calendar was not merely a headcount but a legal accountability document — each entry was keyed to a specific legal authority for detention. This makes the instrument historically relevant to habeas corpus research, because the calendar was the record against which a writ of habeas corpus would be measured to determine whether a prisoner's confinement had a stated legal basis.
Researchers using English legal sources from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries will encounter references to this calendar in the context of assizes and gaol delivery commissions. Staundforde's Pleas of the Crown and Blackstone's Commentaries are the canonical citations in the historical dictionaries, and both address it in the context of the sheriff's duties at circuit court proceedings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's are in close agreement, presenting nearly identical definitions and citing the same two sources: Staundforde's Pleas of the Crown (Pl. Cor.) at page 182, and Blackstone's Commentaries at 4 Bl. Comm. 403. The uniformity signals that this was a settled, uncontested term of English procedural practice rather than a contested or evolving concept.
Neither dictionary addresses the American reception of the term or its fate after the dissolution of the English assize system. This is a characteristic gap in mid-to-late nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries when treating English procedural terms: they preserve the English definition with fidelity but give no guidance on whether American practice adopted, adapted, or abandoned the form. For corpus research purposes, this means the historical dictionaries are reliable for the English meaning but silent on jurisdictional evolution in the United States.
Burrill's entry appends a note on the Latin term Calendae (Kalends), which is etymologically related but legally unconnected to the calendar of prisoners. Researchers should treat this as a dictionary pagination coincidence, not a substantive connection.
Jurisdictional Note
The calendar of prisoners is a term of English law. American jurisdictions did not uniformly adopt the terminology, though the functional practice of maintaining a sheriff's custody list existed in colonial and early American practice. Researchers working in American materials after approximately 1820 are unlikely to encounter the term in active statutory or procedural use; it appears primarily in historical, treatise, and comparative law contexts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Eighth Amendment — Conditions of Confinement and Prisoners' Rights (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia, criminal_193)
Prisoners' Rights — First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment Protections (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia, constitutional_158)