Definition
De temps dont memorie ne court is a Law French phrase meaning "from time whereof memory runneth not" — that is, from time immemorial, or time out of the memory of man. The phrase describes a period so remote in the past that no living person can recall, and no legal record exists to contradict, the existence of a right, custom, or condition. In English common law, this concept served as the foundation for claims of immemorial custom, prescriptive right, and certain common law presumptions about the antiquity of established conditions.
The phrase is functionally equivalent to "time immemorial" and was used in pleading and legal argument to assert that a claimed right, usage, or state of affairs had existed since before the legal horizon of memory — a threshold that English law eventually fixed at a specific date.
Common Confusion
De temps dont memorie ne court is often used interchangeably with "time immemorial" and "time out of mind," and for most practical purposes the terms are synonymous. The distinction worth noting is register: the Law French phrase appears in formal pleading and treatise contexts, while "time immemorial" is the ordinary English equivalent used in judicial opinions and modern legal writing. Researchers should not expect conceptual differences between the phrases — the confusion to guard against is assuming that references to "time immemorial" in English-language sources reflect a different legal standard than the Law French formulation.
A separate and more consequential confusion involves the fixed legal date. Under English law, "time immemorial" was eventually defined by statute as extending back to the beginning of the reign of Richard I (1189). This statutory anchor means the phrase, when used in a legal context, is not merely rhetorical — it carries a specific temporal threshold. Common usage of "time out of mind" carries no such precision.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter this phrase almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth century English legal materials — Year Books, early treatises, and pleading records. Littleton's Tenures, cited in Black's, uses the phrase in discussions of customary tenure and prescriptive right, and these passages are the primary context in which the phrase appears in the Law Mind corpus.
The key navigational point: when this phrase appears in a source, the researcher is almost certainly dealing with a claim of prescriptive right, immemorial custom, or common law presumption of long-continued use. The phrase signals an argument structure, not merely a time reference. A party invoking de temps dont memorie ne court is asserting that the claimed right predates any contradicting evidence and therefore should be treated as legally established.
Historical sources that use this phrase without explaining the fixed 1189 date can mislead modern readers into thinking the standard is purely factual (no living witness can remember otherwise) when in English law it became a legal fiction anchored to a statutory date. Researchers working in property, easements, customary rights, or prescriptive title should be alert to this distinction when moving between early common law sources and later equity or statutory treatments of the same doctrines.
The phrase does not appear in American legal materials with any frequency after the early republic. American courts generally adopted "time immemorial" in English and, over time, replaced the common law prescriptive period with statutory limitation periods, making the concept itself — and this phrase — largely obsolete in American practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines the phrase tersely: "From time whereof memory runneth not; time out of memory of man," citing Littleton's Tenures at sections 143, 145, and 170. This is characteristic of Black's treatment of Law French maxims — the definition is accurate as a translation but provides no doctrinal context.
What Black's does not supply, and what researchers need, is the distinction between the phrase as a rhetorical assertion and as a term of art with legal consequences. Littleton himself used the concept in the context of establishing customary tenure rights — rights that could not be challenged precisely because their origin antedated legal memory. The invocation of this phrase in pleading was therefore a strategic move: it placed the burden on the opposing party to produce evidence of a time when the asserted right did not exist, a burden that was practically impossible to meet.
Historical dictionaries generally agree on the translation but diverge in how much doctrinal weight they attach to the phrase. Researchers relying solely on dictionary definitions will miss the pleading function the phrase served.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase and the doctrine it embodies are products of English common law. In jurisdictions that inherited the English common law tradition, the underlying concept of prescriptive right and immemorial custom survived, but the Law French phrase itself did not travel well. American, Canadian, and Australian legal systems generally use "time immemorial" or have replaced the concept with statutory prescription periods.