Definition
Clausum Pasche (also rendered in Law French as cluse de Pasche) is a term from old English legal practice denoting the close of Easter — specifically, the octave of Easter, meaning the eighth day after Easter Sunday. In ecclesiastical and legal reckoning, this day marked the formal end of the Easter feast season. The term was used in early English procedural law to fix the opening of certain court terms and to anchor legal deadlines calculated from the Easter period.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in early English legal practice and is unlikely to appear in any American legal materials. Researchers working with medieval English statutes, plea rolls, or early common law procedural records will encounter it primarily as a temporal marker — a fixed point in the ecclesiastical calendar that governed court sitting schedules and the commencement of legal terms.
The principal research trap is calendrical: the "eighth day" after Easter in medieval reckoning is inclusive, meaning it falls on the Sunday following Easter Sunday, not seven days later as modern readers might assume. Researchers calculating deadlines or terms in early records must account for this inclusive counting convention.
Burrill traces the term to the Statute of Westminster I, a foundational English procedural statute, making clausum Pasche relevant when researching the origins of English term practice and the ecclesiastical calendar's grip on early common law procedure. Researchers exploring the transition from ecclesiastically-anchored legal terms to fixed secular terms will find this term a useful historical marker.
The term connects broadly to the structure of the old English legal terms — Hilary, Easter, Trinity, and Michaelmas — which organized the entire year of common law court activity. Understanding clausum Pasche requires familiarity with how the church calendar and royal courts operated in tandem before fixed statutory terms replaced the older ecclesiastical framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most substantive available treatment. Burrill identifies the term's procedural context precisely, anchors it to the Statute of Westminster I, and cites Coke's Institutes (2 Inst. 157) as secondary authority, alongside the glossaries of Cowell and Blount. The etymology offered by Blount — that the term is "so called because it closed the feast" — is straightforward and consistent with the term's function.
The historical sources agree entirely on the meaning. There is no divergence among Cowell, Blount, and Burrill. The notable limitation of the historical dictionary record is brevity: none of these sources situate clausum Pasche within the broader mechanics of English legal terms or explain how the octave was used in practice to compute time-sensitive procedural obligations. Researchers needing that context must look beyond the dictionary shelf to Coke's Institutes directly and to scholarship on the English legal calendar.
Jurisdictional Note
Clausum Pasche has no recognized significance in American law and is absent from civil law systems. It is strictly a term of old English legal practice, relevant only in the context of medieval and early modern English legal procedure and the historical sources that describe it.