Definition
A Latin phrase from old English law meaning "meantime" or "the middle time." In legal usage, medium tempus functioned as a term of art denoting the intervening period between two legally significant events — most commonly the period between an original wrong and the point of legal recovery. In this context, it appears most directly in connection with mesne profits: the rents and profits of land that a rightful owner was wrongfully deprived of during the interval between dispossession and recovery of the property. Medium tempus thus names the temporal frame within which mesne profit claims are measured.
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Common Confusion
Medium tempus and mesne profits are related but not identical. Medium tempus is the interval of time itself. Mesne profits are the damages — the economic value of use and occupation lost — that accrued during that interval. The phrase medium tempus in the historical sources is frequently glossed as simply meaning mesne profits, but this conflates the container with its contents. A researcher encountering the phrase in pleading records should understand it as identifying a period, not a quantum of damages.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English legal records, pleadings in ejectment actions, and common law treatises. It is not a term of active modern practice; its research significance is primarily paleographic and interpretive.
The key navigational point: medium tempus is a bridge term. When you encounter it in a historical document, follow it to the underlying mesne profits dispute. The phrase signals that the document is addressing the accounting period — how long the wrongful possession lasted — which governs the scope of the damages claim. This matters when reading old ejectment records or actions in the nature of trespass for mesne profits, where courts and pleaders used medium tempus to define the start and end of the damages window.
Be alert to the Latin abbreviation conventions in manuscript sources. Tempus is frequently contracted, and medium may be rendered med' or abbreviated in ways that obscure the phrase at first glance. Burrill's notation that this is "L. Lat." (Law Latin, as distinct from classical Latin) is a useful reminder: the phrase belongs to the artificial Latin of English legal pleading, not to Roman law sources.
No meaningful jurisdictional evolution transferred this phrase into American practice as a working term. American courts adopting the common law action for mesne profits used English vocabulary but the phrase medium tempus itself dropped out of pleading usage relatively early. Researchers in American colonial and early republic records may encounter it in borrowed forms but should not expect a developed domestic treatment.
The Cowell reference in all four source dictionaries points to John Cowell's Interpreter (1607), the standard early glossary of legal terms. All four dictionary entries are essentially glosses on Cowell rather than independent analysis. This means the historical dictionary support for this term is narrow and derivative — useful for confirming the phrase's meaning and period but not a source of doctrinal depth.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four sources (Black's first edition, Black's second edition, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill) are in complete agreement: medium tempus means "meantime" or "mean time" and is associated with mesne profits. All four cite Cowell as their sole authority. There is no divergence across the sources and no evolution between editions.
Burrill's identification of the term as "L. Lat." (Law Latin) is the only additional interpretive note among the four entries, and it is a genuinely useful one for understanding the term's provenance and register. The phrase belongs to the formal Latin vocabulary of English common law pleading rather than to civilian or ecclesiastical legal tradition.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any discussion of how courts calculated the medium tempus, what events bounded it, or how disputes over its scope were resolved. For that doctrinal content, researchers must go beyond the dictionary sources to treatises on ejectment and mesne profits — Blackstone's Commentaries, Tidd's Practice, and the older action of account for profits will supply the surrounding framework.
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