Definition
In old English law, retrocomitatus refers to the day following the county court — that is, the morrow after the sitting of the comitatus, the formal assembly of the county court. The term is Latin, composed of retro (behind, or after) and comitatus (county court), and it functions as a temporal marker designating the day immediately succeeding a county court session. It appears in procedural contexts where legal acts, deadlines, or obligations were reckoned in relation to court days, and the day after the court sat carried its own distinct procedural significance.
Why It Matters in Research
Retrocomitatus is a highly specialized term of medieval English procedural law. Researchers encountering it will almost certainly be working in primary sources — plea rolls, records of the eyre, or treatises on early English procedure — rather than in modern legal materials. The term has no continuing life in modern law and does not appear in standard common law doctrine after the decline of the county court system.
The chief research trap is temporal precision. Medieval English procedure was heavily keyed to court days, terms, and their associated margins: the day of the court, the day before, and the day after each carried distinct procedural meanings. Confusing retrocomitatus with the court day itself, or with the day preceding it, will produce errors in reading procedural timelines in historical records. Researchers working on matters of default, essoins, or appearances in old English local court practice must distinguish these day-markers carefully.
The reference to Fleta (lib. 2, c. 67, § 18) as the authority cited by Burrill is significant. Fleta is a late thirteenth-century legal treatise, closely related to Bracton and written during the reign of Edward I. It is one of the foundational sources for understanding English procedural law of that period. Any researcher working with this term should consult Fleta directly, as the surrounding context in that chapter will illuminate the procedural significance of the retrocomitatus within the county court framework.
Spelman's translation of retrocomitatus as "rier county" is also worth noting. Spelman's Glossary (Glossarium Archaiologicum) is a key reference tool for Anglo-Latin and Law French legal terminology of this period. The equivalent term "rier county" appears to be the Law French rendering of the same concept. Researchers may find the same procedural concept expressed in either the Latin or Law French form depending on the source document's date and register, and cross-referencing between the two is necessary for complete coverage of the historical record.
Because retrocomitatus belongs to the procedural world of the county court — a institution that declined substantially after the medieval period — it will rarely, if ever, appear in sources after the sixteenth century. Its presence in a document is itself a dating signal pointing toward medieval English legal practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the Law Mind shelf sources. Burrill's treatment is concise and accurate for what it covers: the term is defined as the morrow after the county court, the Latin components are identified, and the authority in Fleta is supplied along with Spelman's translation. This is the standard treatment one would expect for a narrow procedural term of this vintage.
What Burrill does not address — and what no brief dictionary entry could supply — is the substantive procedural context: what, exactly, was required or permitted on the retrocomitatus as distinct from the court day itself. For that, the researcher must go to Fleta and to the broader literature on the county court, essoins, and appearances in medieval English local procedure. Works on the history of English courts and procedure, including Maitland's writings on early English legal institutions, are the appropriate secondary resources for building that context.
No other shelf source covers this term, which reflects its extreme specialization and historical remoteness.