Definition
Latin term meaning "on the morrow" or "the day after." In old English practice, crastino designated the return days of writs — the days on which writs were required to be returned to the court and on which parties were obliged to appear. These return days were always the day after a saint's day, because the first day of each term was itself a saint's day and therefore not available for judicial business. The term appears in the records and pleading books of the common law courts at Westminster and is encountered chiefly in its compound forms, each identifying a specific return day by reference to the saint's day immediately preceding it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern use. Where the Latin root appears in English, "crastinate" (as in "procrastinate") carries the sense of deferring to tomorrow.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered as an independent term. The root cras (Latin: tomorrow) was understood by educated readers but crastino itself remained a term of legal art.
Editorial note: The connection to "procrastinate" is linguistically accurate but practically misleading. In legal usage, crastino does not imply delay or avoidance — it is a precise, calendrical term designating an appointed day that falls structurally the day after a named saint's feast. A researcher encountering it in a historical record should read it as a formal date reference, not as a commentary on tardiness.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records — plea rolls, term books, writs of summons, and procedural treatises — will encounter crastino almost exclusively in its compound forms. A writ returnable "Crastino animarum" is returnable on the morrow of All Souls' Day (November 3), which was also the first return day of Michaelmas Term. "Crastino purificationis beatae Mariae virginis" refers to the morrow of the Feast of the Purification (February 3), a return day in Hilary Term. These compound designations functioned as the standard dating mechanism for writs throughout the medieval period and persisted into the early modern era.
The practical trap for researchers is threefold. First, the same return day may be expressed in multiple ways across sources — by the saint's name, by the feast name, by a numerical designation within the term, or by the crastino formula — and these are not always immediately recognizable as identical dates. Second, the saint's day calendar underlying these designations was the pre-Reformation Catholic calendar; after the Reformation, some feast days were suppressed or renamed, creating inconsistency in later sources that continued to use the older terminology by convention. Third, "crastino" as an abbreviation in manuscript sources is easily misread or overlooked. Burrill cites Reeves' History of English Law for the general framework, and Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III) provides the broader procedural context for return days; both are natural starting points for understanding how these dates mapped onto term structure.
Researchers consulting plea rolls through the Public Records or working with Maitland's editions of early court records will find crastino dates essential for sequencing proceedings correctly. Misidentifying the return day can displace an entire chain of procedural steps in a case reconstruction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill provides the most complete treatment, identifying crastino as a "title formerly given to the return days of writs, days in bank, or appearance days in the courts at Westminster" and supplying specific examples of the compound forms with their feast-day equivalents. Black's (both editions) correctly explains the structural reason for the next-day convention — saint's days were not available for secular judicial business — and cites Reeve's History of English Law for support. The first edition of Black's contains a truncated entry that appears to conflate or abut the definition with a separate entry for "convent" (noting "a contraction... of the word convent"), which likely reflects a typographical or editorial artifact of the original printing rather than a substantive claim about crastino itself.
None of the historical dictionaries provides a comprehensive list of the compound crastino dates across all four terms, nor do they address the post-Reformation complications. For exhaustive mapping of return days to calendar dates, researchers should consult specialized guides to legal chronology such as those found in the appendices of Maitland's works or dedicated handbooks on medieval English record dating.
Jurisdictional Note
Crastino is a term of English common law practice with no operative counterpart in American legal usage. It appears in American legal dictionaries only for historical reference. Researchers working in colonial American records from jurisdictions that adopted English term and return-day structures may occasionally encounter it, but it is functionally obsolete outside historical English legal documents.