Definition
Diemane is an archaic term from old English legal practice referring to a day assigned or appointed — specifically, a day given or set by a court for an appearance, proceeding, or return. It denotes a judicially fixed date to which a matter is continued or adjourned, equivalent in function to what modern practice would call a hearing date, return date, or continuance.
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Common Confusion
DIEMANE and DICTUM: Based on available source material, these two terms appear to have been conflated in the corpus entry for DIEMANE. Dictum (Latin: "a saying") is a well-attested legal term with sustained relevance in both historical and modern law — covering judicial observations made outside the ratio decidendi of a case, as well as the historical usage of jury verdicts framed as "they say upon their oath." Diemane, by contrast, is a narrow procedural archaism. Do not import any of the definitional content associated with dictum into research concerning diemane.
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Why It Matters in Research
Diemane appears almost exclusively in records of medieval English court practice and early common law pleading materials. Researchers encountering the term in plea rolls, eyre records, or early treatises should understand that it functions as a scheduling or procedural marker — it signals that a matter was not concluded at the current sitting but was carried forward to a named day. Confusing diemane with substantive judgment language would misread the procedural posture of the case entirely.
The term belongs to a cluster of Latin and Law French procedural vocabulary that populated English court records from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. It is rarely indexed in later abridgments and does not survive into modern legal usage in any recognizable form, meaning researchers working backward from modern secondary sources will find little guidance. The trail runs through primary plea roll records and the early treatise tradition — Bracton, Britton, and Fleta — rather than through the digest or reporter tradition.
Researchers should note that Burrill's entry for DIEMANE is sparse, reflecting the term's narrow procedural function and its absence from the mainstream of common law doctrine. It does not generate a body of interpretive case law; it is procedural furniture, not substantive doctrine.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary surviving lexicographic treatment of diemane in the American legal dictionary tradition, though Burrill's entry as preserved here appears to have been conflated with or proximately located to his entry on DICTUM — the text reproduced above concerns "an assertion or statement," "gratis dictum," "simplex dictum," and the verdict of a jury as literally "a saying." This is a distinct term.
Researchers should be alert to a transcription or catalog artifact: the source material supplied under the heading DIEMANE reproduces definitional content characteristic of Burrill's DICTUM entry, not diemane. This is a meaningful research trap. The DICTUM entry covers: (1) a gratuitous or voluntary representation a party is not bound to make, citing 2 Kent's Commentaries 486; (2) a mere assertion without proof, citing Bracton fol. 320; and (3) in old practice, the verdict of a jury — literally "a saying" — originally entered on record as "Dicunt super sacramentum suum" (they say upon their oath), citing Plac. Cor. Just. Itin.
None of this content addresses diemane as a procedural day-assignment concept. The conflation is likely a product of alphabetical proximity in the source dictionary or an indexing error in the corpus. Researchers using Law Mind's corpus to locate diemane should verify the surrounding page context in Burrill's original to determine whether a true diemane entry exists independently, or whether the term appears only in passing within another entry's text.
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