Definition
Quadragesima is a Latin term meaning "the fortieth." In legal usage it carries two closely related meanings:
1. The first Sunday in Lent, so called because it falls approximately forty days before Easter. This sense — sometimes styled Quadragesima Sunday — was used in legal instruments, court records, and ecclesiastical documents to fix a date or identify a term.
2. More broadly, the forty-day season of Lent itself. Rapalje & Lawrence define it as "the time of Lent, because consisting of forty days."
In practice the two meanings overlap: references to Quadragesima in older legal documents may denote either the opening day or the entire season, and context usually resolves the ambiguity.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A synonym for Lent, or for the first Sunday in Lent (Quadragesima Sunday).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The forty days of fast preceding Easter; Lent. Quadragesima Sunday, the first Sunday in Lent, about forty days before Easter."
The common and legal meanings here are largely coextensive. The distinction worth noting is that legal usage tends to fasten on Quadragesima Sunday as a specific calendar anchor for dating writs, pleadings, and court proceedings — a precision that general religious usage does not require.
Why It Matters in Research
Quadragesima is principally a dating term in the historical legal record. Researchers encountering it in medieval and early modern English legal documents — writs, court rolls, ecclesiastical records, conveyances — should treat it as a temporal marker, not a substantive legal concept. The specific day (Quadragesima Sunday) was used to identify when a proceeding was commenced, when a debt fell due, or when an obligation was to be performed, in the same manner as other liturgical dates such as Michaelmas or Hilary.
The chief research trap is conflation: some sources use Quadragesima to mean the Sunday alone; others use it to mean the full Lenten season. A document saying something must occur "in Quadragesima" likely means at some point during the Lenten period, while a document setting a date "on Quadragesima" almost certainly means the first Sunday. Misreading the scope can materially affect the dating of events in a historical record.
Researchers working with ecclesiastical court records or tithe documentation may also encounter Quadragesima in connection with Quadragesimal offerings — customary payments made to the mother church during Lent — though this usage shades into canon law and is not consistently captured by the common law dictionaries.
No meaningful jurisdictional evolution tracks the term. Its legal function was calendrical and disappeared from active legal use as fixed calendar dating replaced liturgical reference points in pleading and procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill adopt identical definitions, all citing Cowell's Interpreter — a seventeenth-century English legal glossary — as authority. This convergence reflects the term's status as a received historical term rather than a contested legal concept: there was nothing to argue about, and so the dictionaries simply passed the definition forward unchanged across editions.
Rapalje & Lawrence offer the marginally broader formulation ("the time of Lent"), which aligns with Webster's and Wiktionary but is underrepresented in the Black's tradition. Neither approach is wrong; they capture the two uses of the word at different levels of specificity.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the practical legal context — how the term actually functioned in pleading, how courts interpreted date references keyed to Quadragesima Sunday, or how it related to the formal terms of court (Hilary, Easter, Trinity, Michaelmas). Researchers needing that context must look beyond the dictionary entries to treatises on common law pleading and ecclesiastical practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See also: Law Mind Encyclopedia — Ecclesiastical Calendar and Legal Dating; Terms of Court (Historical)