Definition
Corpus Christi Day is a feast day of the Roman Catholic Church, instituted in 1264, celebrated in honor of the Eucharist (the sacrament of the body of Christ). In English legal history, it carried significance as one of the recognized religious feast days on which certain legal proceedings, court sittings, and commercial transactions were suspended or restricted by statute.
The day falls on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday, placing it in late May or June. Its legal relevance derives from English statutes — notably 32 Henry VIII, c. 21 — which regulated conduct, work, and legal activity on feast days recognized by the established church calendar.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A Christian feast day honoring the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, observed on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday; celebrated with processions and liturgical ceremony primarily in Catholic and some Anglican traditions.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The festival of the body of Christ, a festival of the Roman Catholic Church, instituted in 1264 by Pope Urban IV, observed on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday."
The common meaning and the legal meaning are largely continuous — the feast is the same event. The legal gap is functional rather than definitional: in English law, Corpus Christi Day was not simply a religious observance but a dies non juridicus, a day on which courts did not sit and certain legal obligations were tolled or suspended. The common usage carries no trace of this procedural dimension.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with English legal records from the medieval period through the early modern era will encounter Corpus Christi Day as a date marker and as a dies non — a day excluded from the computation of legal time. When a document is dated "on Corpus Christi Day" or a deadline is reckoned "from Corpus Christi," the moveable nature of the feast (like Easter, it shifts year to year) requires calendrical conversion before the date can be confirmed or compared against other records.
The statutory hook — 32 Hen. VIII, c. 21 — is the anchor citation appearing in both Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence. Researchers encountering this citation should note it belongs to the Henrician Reformation era, when Parliament was actively regulating the observance of feast days, partly to restrict Catholic holy days and partly to standardize commercial and legal calendars. The continued citation to this statute in American legal dictionaries into the early twentieth century reflects the persistence of English common law source material in American legal publishing, not any ongoing American legal relevance.
For American legal research, Corpus Christi Day has no operative significance. It does not appear in federal or state holiday schedules and carries no procedural effect in any American jurisdiction. Its presence in American law dictionaries is an artifact of English common law inheritance in the dictionary tradition, not evidence of practical application.
Researchers using historical English court records, property conveyances, or ecclesiastical records should maintain a table of moveable feast days by year, as Corpus Christi Day and similar feasts appear regularly as reference dates in documents spanning the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st Ed.) and Rapalje & Lawrence give identical, minimal entries: "A feast instituted in 1264, in honor of the sacrament. 32 Hen. VIII. c. 21." Neither source elaborates on the procedural consequences — the dies non dimension — that would be most useful to a legal researcher. Both entries function as identification aids rather than analytical definitions.
The second edition text attributed to Black's in the source material appears to be a misaligned entry concerning "corporeal" and "corporeal hereditaments," not a substantive entry for Corpus Christi Day. This is a transcription artifact and should be disregarded for the present entry.
No source dictionary addresses the moveable calendar character of the feast, its interaction with legal time computation, or its obsolescence in post-Reformation and American legal practice. These gaps are significant for researchers who might otherwise treat the dictionary entry as a complete account of the term's legal function.
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Jurisdictional Note
Corpus Christi Day has no current legal significance in any American jurisdiction. Its historical legal relevance is confined to English law, primarily pre-nineteenth century. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or continental European legal records should verify separately whether and how the feast day was recognized in those legal systems, as English statutory treatment does not automatically carry over.
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