Definition
Latin. "On the morrow." A term of temporal reference used in medieval English legal practice and court records to designate the day following a specified feast day, saint's day, or other calendrical marker. Courts and legal instruments of the medieval period routinely dated proceedings and return days by reference to the ecclesiastical calendar, and in crastino identified the day immediately after the named feast.
The phrase most commonly appears in historical sources as in crastino Animarum — "on the morrow of All Souls" — designating November 3rd, the day after All Souls' Day (November 2nd). Other feast days generated analogous constructions following the same pattern.
Common Confusion
In crastino should not be confused with in die, which designates the feast day itself, or with the octave (in octavis), which designates the eighth day after a feast. Medieval court records frequently used all three constructions, and misreading one for another can place a document or proceeding off by a day or by a full week. Researchers working in plea rolls, fine rolls, or medieval indentures should be alert to which temporal marker is actually present in the text.
Why It Matters in Research
This term surfaces almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal records — plea rolls, writs, and court documents from the medieval period through the early modern era, when the ecclesiastical calendar governed the scheduling of legal proceedings. Understanding in crastino is essential for anyone dating documents or reconstructing the procedural timeline of medieval litigation.
The practical challenge for researchers is that the ecclesiastical calendar is not fixed to modern civil dates in an obvious way. Moveable feasts (those tied to Easter) shift from year to year, meaning that in crastino attached to a moveable feast requires independent calculation to convert to a Julian or Gregorian date. Fixed feasts are easier but still require familiarity with the liturgical calendar.
The term also signals the broader system of return days — dies ad quem — by which medieval courts organized their terms. A writ might command an appearance in crastino of a particular feast, and understanding that command requires knowing both the feast and the counting convention (the morrow is one day after; the octave is eight days after by inclusive count). Conflating these conventions introduces dating errors that ripple through any subsequent analysis.
Modern legal research rarely encounters in crastino in operative documents, but it appears frequently in scholarly editions of medieval records, calendars of patent rolls and close rolls, and treatises on English legal history. Researchers using digitized manuscript sources or calendared records from the Public Record Office (now The National Archives, UK) will encounter the term in translated and untranslated forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core translation — "on the morrow" — and all cite the same illustrative phrase, in crastino Animarum, with the same reference to 1 Blackstone's Commentaries 342. This uniformity reflects that the term was not contested or evolving in the legal lexicon; it was simply archaic Latin requiring translation.
Burrill adds the cross-reference to his own entry for Crastino, suggesting researchers consult that companion term. He also notes the Latin Law origin explicitly, labeling the term "L. Lat." (Law Latin), which usefully distinguishes this vocabulary from classical Latin or ecclesiastical Latin proper — it belongs to the specialized legal-administrative Latin of English courts.
None of the source dictionaries elaborate on the broader system of feast-day dating within which in crastino functioned, which is a significant gap for the modern researcher. The entries treat the phrase as self-contained, but its utility depends entirely on knowing the ecclesiastical calendar and the distinction between dies, crastino, and octavis constructions. Modern resources on medieval diplomatic and legal chronology — such as C.R. Cheney's Handbook of Dates for Students of British History — are indispensable supplements that the historical dictionaries do not flag.
Jurisdictional Note
In crastino is a term of English legal practice and does not appear in American or continental European legal sources in any operative sense. Its relevance is confined to English (and by extension early British colonial) legal records predating the systematic adoption of modern civil dating conventions.