Definition
Ember Days are four sets of three days each — specifically the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday following certain fixed points in the Christian liturgical calendar — observed in the Western church as days of fasting, prayer, and, crucially for legal purposes, the ordination of clergy. The four periods fall after: (1) the first Sunday in Lent (Quadragesima Sunday); (2) Whitsuntide (Pentecost); (3) Holyrood Day in September (the Feast of the Holy Cross, September 14); and (4) St. Lucy's Day (December 13). The Latin designation used in canonical sources is quatuor tempora, meaning "four seasons," reflecting their rough correspondence to the quarters of the year.
In English ecclesiastical and common law, Ember Days carried legal significance primarily because they were the prescribed times for the ordination of deacons and priests in the Church of England. This made them relevant to questions of clerical title, the validity of orders, and — in an era when the established church and the civil courts intersected — to disputes touching livings, advowsons, and the right of presentation to a benefice.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "Ember day" — days of fasting and prayer observed in certain Christian traditions at four points in the year.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; almanacs of the period marked "Ember weeks" as the weeks in which these days fell, treating them primarily as calendar notations.
Editorial note: The common understanding of Ember Days as purely religious observances misses their legal dimension entirely. In English law, the days functioned as a legal calendar marker governing when valid ordinations could occur, and the regularity or irregularity of an ordination relative to Ember Days could affect civil rights attached to clerical office — particularly in disputes over presentation to a benefice or the validity of a clergyman's title to a living.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter Ember Days in English ecclesiastical law materials, particularly those dealing with advowsons, simony, and the right of presentation — the cluster of property-adjacent rights tied to church livings that occupied considerable space in English common law well into the nineteenth century. When a living fell vacant and a patron exercised the right of presentation, the bishop's act of ordination or institution was expected to occur at Ember tide; irregularities in timing could generate litigation.
The term virtually disappears from American legal sources because the United States inherited no established church and therefore no civil law superstructure for ecclesiastical preferment. Researchers working in colonial American legal records may find isolated references, but they are rare and typically derive directly from English sources.
In the Law Mind corpus, Ember Days will appear almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century English ecclesiastical law materials. The term is a reliable signal that surrounding text concerns clerical appointment, benefice rights, or canonical procedure — useful orientation when navigating dense church-law materials where context is otherwise sparse.
A practical trap: almanac references to "Ember weeks" in historical documents are not legal references; they are calendar notations. Only references in the context of ordination, institution, or presentation carry legal weight.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary provide essentially identical entries, reproducing the same core description with a citation to Britton (a thirteenth-century English legal text, chapter 53 in the first edition, chapter 58 in the second — a minor editorial discrepancy between editions). Both entries note that almanacs of the period marked the weeks, not merely the days, as "Ember weeks," suggesting the broader period was practically understood as the operative window.
Neither edition develops the legal consequences of Ember Days beyond identifying the ecclesiastical context. This is a meaningful gap: the entries tell researchers what the days are and when they fall but do not explain why a common law dictionary includes them at all. The answer lies in the English law of advowsons and the Statute of Anne and earlier statutes touching simony, where the timing of ordination relative to Ember Days had procedural significance.
No entry in either edition cross-references advowson, simony, or presentation, which are the terms that give Ember Days their legal rather than purely liturgical content.
Jurisdictional Note
Ember Days have no legal significance in American law. The term is confined to English ecclesiastical law and jurisdictions that inherited the Church of England's canonical framework. Researchers working in English legal history prior to the disestablishment era should treat Ember Days as an active legal calendar reference; researchers in American materials can treat it as purely historical background.