Definition
In quinque septimanas is a Latin phrase from medieval English law meaning "in five weeks" or "at five weeks." It designated a specific return day in the old common law writ system — a date falling five weeks after a fixed term or feast day by which a party, officer, or court was required to appear, respond, or complete a procedural act. Like other return days identified by their interval from a term (such as in octavis, in quindecim dies), in quinque septimanas functioned as a calendrical shorthand within the rigid scheduling structure of the English royal courts.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is an artifact of the old English writ return day system, which governed the timing of virtually every procedural step in common law litigation from the medieval period through the early modern era. Researchers working with plea rolls, writs of summons, or procedural records from the Courts of Common Pleas, King's Bench, or Exchequer before the nineteenth-century reforms will encounter return day terminology routinely. The phrase itself appears infrequently in surviving digests precisely because it was one of the less common intervals — the octave (eight days), quindene (fifteen days), and month (one month) were far more standard. Its rarity in secondary sources means that researchers who encounter it in a primary document may struggle to identify it without access to period-specific procedural treatises or tables of return days.
The context matters: in quinque septimanas is not a substantive legal concept but a procedural timestamp. Misreading or mistranslating it would cause a researcher to misdate a critical procedural event — potentially misunderstanding whether a default had occurred, whether a continuance was granted, or whether jurisdiction had attached. The phrase must be read in conjunction with the feast day or term to which it is anchored, since five weeks from Michaelmas is a different calendar date than five weeks from Hilary.
Burrill's entry is truncated in surviving form, cutting off mid-sentence with a reference to "one of the old re-" — almost certainly "one of the old return days." This gap underscores a broader research challenge: nineteenth-century legal dictionaries often treated Latin procedural terms as self-explanatory to their audience and devoted minimal space to them. Researchers today lack that background and need to reconstruct context from period procedural manuals.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole dictionary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus, and its entry is incomplete, breaking off before the explanatory content concludes. The fragment confirms the phrase's meaning as "in five weeks" and identifies it as belonging to the category of old return day formulas, which is consistent with the broader system documented in period procedural literature. No other historical dictionary in the standard reference shelf — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — appears to carry a dedicated entry for this specific phrase, reflecting its narrow procedural function and limited currency outside of primary source work.
The absence of fuller treatment across the historical dictionaries is itself informative: this is a term that practitioners of the common law writ system would have known from practice and from specialized procedural tables rather than from general legal dictionaries. Works such as Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and later procedural guides to common law practice contained the calendars and return day tables that gave phrases like this one operational meaning.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs exclusively to the historical English common law procedural tradition and its direct descendants. It has no operative meaning in modern American, English, or Commonwealth courts, which abolished the old return day system in the course of nineteenth-century procedural reforms.