Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "in ordinary years" or "one year with another." Used in legal and commercial contexts to express an annual average — that is, a calculation based on the typical or mean performance across a span of years rather than any single year's result. When a quantity is stated communibus annis, it represents what would be expected in an average or ordinary year, smoothing out exceptional highs and lows across the period under consideration.
The phrase functions as a term of measurement or qualification: it signals that a figure, obligation, yield, or rate is not fixed to one specific year but is derived from, or should be assessed against, the average of multiple years taken together.
Common Language
No meaningful common-language counterpart exists. The phrase is Latin legal and commercial terminology with no ordinary English usage. Omitted accordingly.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical legal materials — particularly in disputes involving rents, tithes, customary dues, agricultural yields, or commercial obligations — should recognize it as a term of valuation methodology, not a term of substantive right. Its significance lies in how a court or arbitrator was instructed to calculate a number, not in what the underlying entitlement was.
The phrase appears most frequently in English common law sources from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, where courts and conveyancers needed a principled way to assess obligations tied to variable outputs such as harvest yields or market prices. A researcher who misreads communibus annis as referring to a single year's figure will misunderstand the basis of the calculation being described.
Because the phrase drops out of modern legal usage almost entirely, it presents a recognition problem in historical sources: a researcher unfamiliar with the term may mistake it for a proper name, a place, or an unrelated Latin formula. When encountered in older case reports or treatises, it is a reliable signal that the passage concerns averaging methodology and that the underlying dispute likely involves fluctuating periodic obligations.
The phrase connects to broader research threads involving customary rights, ecclesiastical tithe disputes, lease valuation, and the assessment of damages or rents in equity. Burrill's citation to Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Com. 322) and to reported cases (Hardr. 329; 10 East, 219) provides useful anchors for tracing how English courts applied the concept in practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core meaning: "in ordinary years" and "on the annual average," with Burrill adding the clarifying gloss "one year with another," which captures the sense of reciprocal averaging most precisely. Burrill's entry is the most useful of the three, both for its fuller phrasing and for its citations to primary sources.
Black's (both editions) provides only the bare definition without context or citation, reflecting the compressive style of those volumes for Latin maxims. Neither Black's edition adds anything to what Burrill supplies.
What the historical dictionaries collectively do not explain is why the concept mattered procedurally: averaging was often the only equitable way to assess obligations tied to agricultural production or commodity prices, where a single year's result could be anomalous. The phrase encodes a methodological choice with real consequences for the parties, a dimension the dictionary entries leave implicit.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is primarily a feature of English common law and equity practice. American courts occasionally employed it in early republic-era decisions involving analogous valuation questions, but it does not appear as a term of art in modern American legal usage. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or early colonial legal sources may encounter it in similar contexts.