Definition
A calendrical term used in historical legal instruments to identify a specific day in the ecclesiastical calendar: the second Sunday before Lent, falling approximately sixty days before Easter. Because Easter is a moveable feast — its date shifting each year according to a lunar calculation — Sexagesima Sunday has no fixed calendar date. It falls somewhere between late January and early March depending on the year. The term was used in deeds, wills, leases, and court documents as a time reference, functioning as a recognizable landmark in a calendar system that many parties in pre-modern and early modern England would have known by rote.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In the Catholic liturgical year, the eighth Sunday (i.e. the sixtieth — minus one — day) before Easter, and the second Sunday before Lent.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; derived from Latin sexagesima (sixtieth), referring to the roughly sixtieth day before Easter.
The gap here is one of context rather than meaning. In ordinary religious usage, Sexagesima Sunday is simply a liturgical observance. In legal documents, the same day functioned as a date certain — a temporal anchor for obligations, rents, appearances, and deadlines. The distinction matters because a researcher must calculate the actual calendar date for any given year in which it appears, which requires knowing the Easter date for that year.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is treating Sexagesima Sunday as a fixed date. It is not. Any legal instrument that specifies performance, payment, or appearance on or by Sexagesima Sunday requires the researcher to determine the Easter date for the relevant year and count backward. Easter tables and perpetual calendars are necessary tools; standard legal databases will not perform this conversion automatically.
The term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern and early modern English legal instruments — leases for terms of years, bonds, church records, and ecclesiastical court proceedings — where the liturgical calendar was the common framework for organizing time. By the nineteenth century, such references had become unusual in purely civil instruments as the Gregorian calendar became the dominant framework for legal dating, though ecclesiastical courts and documents relating to church property or tithes continued to use liturgical markers longer than secular practice.
Researchers working in English ecclesiastical law, church property records, tithe disputes, and glebe documentation are most likely to encounter this term. It may also appear in the records of colonial American jurisdictions that carried English ecclesiastical conventions into their early legal practice.
A secondary trap concerns the similar-sounding terms Quinquagesima (the Sunday immediately before Lent, roughly fifty days before Easter) and Septuagesima (the third Sunday before Lent, roughly seventy days before Easter). These three Sundays — Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima — formed a sequence in the pre-Lenten liturgical calendar, and a misreading of the prefix can shift a legal deadline by one or two weeks.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition without variation: Sexagesima Sunday is the second Sunday before Lent, approximately the sixtieth day before Easter. Black's first and second editions are essentially identical, with the second edition noting its ecclesiastical law context explicitly. Rapalje and Lawrence append entries for Sextary and Sextery Lands immediately following — terms sharing the Latin root sex — which reflects the alphabetical compression of historical dictionaries rather than any conceptual connection.
None of the source dictionaries address the practical calculation problem or the moveable nature of the date, which is the aspect most likely to cause difficulty in actual research. Historical sources assume the reader already knows the ecclesiastical calendar; modern researchers generally do not.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is primarily an English legal import. Its use in American legal documents is largely confined to colonial-era records and to jurisdictions with strong Anglican or Catholic ecclesiastical court traditions. Researchers working in Louisiana civil law sources or Spanish colonial records should not expect to encounter it; those terms of art drew from different calendrical conventions.