Definition
Clausum Paschiz is a Latin term from English ecclesiastical and common law referring to the close or end of Easter. Specifically, it denotes the morrow of the octave of Easter — that is, the Sunday falling one week after Easter Sunday, marking the formal conclusion of the Easter liturgical season. The term translates roughly as "the close of Easter" or "Easter's end."
In historical legal practice, this date functioned as a temporal marker in legal instruments, writs, and proceedings. Courts and legal documents frequently reckoned time by reference to feast days and their octaves, and clausum Paschiz served as a fixed calendrical point — the boundary after which the Easter term or Easter period was deemed concluded.
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Why It Matters in Research
Clausum Paschiz is primarily a dating term encountered in historical English legal documents, particularly writs, pleadings, and court records from the medieval and early modern periods when ecclesiastical calendar reckoning governed legal time computation.
Researchers working with pre-modern English common law records should be aware that dates expressed by feast day reference require translation into modern calendar equivalents, and clausum Paschiz will fall on a different Gregorian date each year since Easter is a movable feast. A document dated "in the octave of Easter" or "at the close of Easter" in a given regnal year requires cross-referencing Easter tables to reconstruct the precise modern date.
The term appears in procedural contexts — particularly in relation to the Easter law term — and researchers should not confuse the ecclesiastical close of Easter with the technical beginning or end of the legal Easter Term, which had its own formal dates under English court practice. These did not always align perfectly with the liturgical calendar.
Because this term belongs to the stratum of Latin ecclesiastical vocabulary embedded in the common law, it is largely absent from American legal sources. Researchers encountering it will almost exclusively do so in English Year Books, Plea Rolls, Chancery records, and early English treatises and commentaries.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only dictionary treatment available in the Law Mind corpus. Black's defines clausum Paschiz as "the morrow of the utes, or eight days of Easter; the end of Easter; the Sunday after Easter-day," citing Coke's Institutes (2 Inst. 157).
The definition is consistent and uncontested — there is no meaningful divergence across sources because the term is narrow and technical, functioning purely as a calendrical marker. The reference to "utes" reflects the medieval usage of "octave" (utas or utes), the eighth day after a feast, inclusive of the feast day itself. The Sunday after Easter Sunday, counting Easter as day one, is day eight — hence the octave, and hence clausum Paschiz as that day.
Historical sources do not elaborate substantive legal doctrine around this term; its legal significance lies entirely in its use as a date reference. Coke's treatment at 2 Institutes 157 confirms its use in the context of time computation in English law.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to historical English law and has no operative significance in modern American, English, or Commonwealth legal systems. It will not appear in contemporary legal practice and is relevant only to historical legal research involving pre-modern English documents.
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