Definition
Essoin day was, in English common law practice, the first general return day of a term — the designated day on which courts sat to receive essoins, meaning formal excuses submitted on behalf of parties who failed to appear in response to a writ or summons. The term derives from the practice of essoin itself, the procedural device by which an absent party could offer a recognized excuse (illness, being abroad in the king's service, and similar grounds) to avoid a default judgment for non-appearance.
The day functioned as an administrative opening to the term: before any substantive business was heard, the court acknowledged the roster of absent parties and their proffered excuses. A party who failed to appear and had no essoin entered on essoin day risked being treated as in default.
The practice was formally abolished in England by statute — 11 Geo. IV and 1 Wm. IV c. 70, § 6 — which eliminated essoin days as a recognized component of the term. By the time the major historical dictionaries consolidated their entries, the institution was already a relic.
Common Confusion
Essoin day should not be confused with essoin itself. Essoin is the excuse — the substantive procedural device. Essoin day is the procedural moment, the calendar event during which those excuses were formally received and recorded. A researcher encountering "essoin" in an older pleading or writ return is dealing with the excuse; "essoin day" marks when and where that excuse had to be presented. The two terms appear in close proximity in historical sources, and conflating them obscures how the older term system actually operated.
Why It Matters in Research
Essoin day is a navigational term for researchers working in English common law records predating the nineteenth-century procedural reforms. Its primary research relevance is contextual and chronological:
Pleading and writ records. In early English practice, the structure of a term was built around return days, and essoin day anchored the beginning of that sequence. Court rolls, plea rolls, and early reports that refer to the first day of term or to the receipt of excuses are situating events on or around essoin day. Without understanding this structure, the sequence of procedural steps in old pleadings can appear arbitrary.
The abolition baseline. The statutory abolition under 11 Geo. IV and 1 Wm. IV c. 70, § 6 is the hard cutoff. Sources predating this reform treat essoin day as a live procedural reality; sources after treat it as historical background. Researchers should date their sources accordingly — a treatise or digest written after 1830 that discusses essoin day is describing abolished practice.
American practice. Essoin day did not survive transplantation to American courts in any meaningful procedural form. American jurisdictions adopted simpler appearance and default mechanisms early. The term appears in American legal dictionaries because those dictionaries drew heavily on English sources, not because American courts observed essoin day practice. Researchers encountering the term in an American legal text are almost certainly reading a dictionary definition or a historical reference, not a live procedural rule.
Connection to default and appearance rules. The functional role essoin day played — managing non-appearance and excuses at the opening of a term — has analogs in modern default and continuance practice, but the structural resemblance is loose. Researchers tracing the historical roots of default judgment rules will pass through essoin practice, but essoin day itself is an endpoint, not a through-line.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Bouvier's, and Burrill's are in close agreement, which is unsurprising given that all three draw from the same primary sources: Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 278), Tidd's Practice (1 Tidd Pr. 107), Gilbert's Common Pleas, and Boote's Suit at Law. The core description — first general return day of term, courts sitting to receive excuses — is identical across all three.
Bouvier's is the most compressed, noting only that essoin day was the first day of term and was "now practically abolished," which reflects the post-1830 posture shared by all three dictionaries. Burrill's and Black's provide the fuller statutory reference.
None of the three historical dictionaries discuss essoin day's relationship to the broader structure of the term in any analytical depth — they treat it as a definition to be noted and moved past. Researchers wanting to understand how essoin day fit into the sequence of return days, the quindene, the octave, and the various other term-day designations will need to look beyond dictionary sources to Blackstone and the procedural treatises directly.
What the dictionaries do not address: the variation in essoin day practice across different English courts (common pleas versus king's bench), or the earlier medieval forms from which the institution descended. For those questions, Blackstone's Commentaries and secondary histories of English procedure are the appropriate starting points.
Jurisdictional Note
Essoin day was an institution of English common law practice and has no operational significance in any American jurisdiction. It appears in American legal dictionaries as a matter of historical completeness. Researchers working in English legal history should treat the statutory abolition in 1830 as the governing cutoff for live practice.