Definition
Latin: "of uncertain time" or "of uncertain date." A descriptive label applied in English legal history to statutes and reported cases whose date of enactment or decision could not be established with confidence. The phrase identifies a document as temporally unanchored — known to exist, but not assignable to a specific year or reign.
Two related forms appear in historical sources:
1. Incerti temporis — of uncertain time or date. Applied specifically to a body of English statutes enacted between Magna Carta (1215) and the reign of Edward III (beginning 1327), whose precise dates of passage were not determined by early legal historians.
2. Incerti nominis et temporis — of uncertain name and date. Applied to cases in the old English reports that could not be attributed to a named party or a datable term of court.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal history or early common law sources will encounter this label as a signal of evidentiary limitation, not substantive legal content. It tells you what is not known about a source, which is itself important information.
The gap between Magna Carta and the early Edwardian statutes is a notoriously difficult period for English legal bibliography. Statutes from this era were not systematically enrolled or dated, and early historians of English law — including Reeves — could not always determine whether a given provision dated from Henry III, the Provisions of Oxford era, or the early reign of Edward I. When a statute is tagged incerti temporis, it means the document survived transmission but its legislative context did not.
For case research, incerti nominis et temporis entries in the old reports (particularly Hobart and similar early reporters) present a compounded problem: neither the parties nor the date can be confirmed. These cases are cited rarely and cautiously, and their precedential weight in modern research is negligible. Their value is primarily antiquarian — establishing that a legal principle had some circulation in the early common law period, even if the specific occasion cannot be reconstructed.
Researchers should be alert to the possibility that a statute or case labeled incerti temporis by one authority may be given a specific date by another, based on subsequent archival work. The label reflects the state of knowledge at the time of compilation, not a permanent verdict on the document's datability. Later scholarship, particularly work done on the Parliament Rolls and early statute rolls in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has resolved the dating of some previously indeterminate texts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, citing Reeves' History of English Law (volume 2, pages 85 and 312) for the statutes and Hobart's Reports (page 2) for the case application. These citations are specific and traceable. Reeves' History was a standard reference for early English legal development, and its treatment of the post-Magna Carta statutory period reflects the scholarly consensus of its time regarding the disorder of early legislative records.
Burrill does not elaborate on which specific statutes carried this designation or offer a list, and no other dictionary in the Law Mind corpus addresses the term. The entry is narrow and technical, consistent with the phrase's function as a descriptive label rather than a legal doctrine. No significant divergence exists across sources because the coverage is effectively singular.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the paleographic and archival history that has since clarified some of these datings. Burrill's treatment is accurate for its era but should be understood as a snapshot of nineteenth-century legal bibliography, not a final account.
Jurisdictional Note
Exclusively an English common law and legal history term. No American or other common law jurisdiction developed an independent usage. Researchers encounter it only in historical English sources and in treatises or dictionaries commenting on those sources.