Definition
In historical legal usage, TEMPORALITY has two related meanings:
1. The laity; secular persons as distinguished from the clergy. In this sense, the temporality (or temporalities, collectively) referred to the non-clerical members of society who existed outside ecclesiastical governance.
2. The secular revenues, properties, and material possessions of the church — lands, tenements, tithes, and lay fees held by ecclesiastical persons or institutions in their temporal (non-spiritual) capacity. In this second and more legally significant sense, temporalities were property interests subject to civil jurisdiction, as opposed to spiritualities, which fell under church courts. A bishop's temporalities, for example, were the worldly estates and revenues of the see, which the Crown could seize during a vacancy or as a consequence of royal displeasure.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The condition of being bounded in time; the quality of being temporal rather than eternal.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The state or quality of being temporary; also, that which pertains to temporal welfare or material interests, especially the revenue of an ecclesiastic proceeding from lands, tenements, or lay fees.
The gap here is meaningful. Modern general usage treats "temporality" almost entirely as a philosophical or grammatical concept about time-boundedness — a word more likely to appear in a theology seminar or a grammar text than a courtroom. The legal and historical meaning is unrelated to duration or the passage of time. It concerns the secular character of property and persons within a church-state framework. A researcher encountering "temporality" in a historical legal document almost certainly needs the ecclesiastical property meaning, not any concept about time.
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Common Confusion
TEMPORALITY vs. TEMPORARINESS: These are entirely distinct. Temporariness refers to limited duration; temporality (in legal usage) refers to secular as opposed to spiritual character. The confusion is almost entirely a modern one — historical legal writers used "temporality" without ambiguity.
TEMPORALITIES vs. SPIRITUALITIES: The critical paired distinction. Spiritualities were the strictly ecclesiastical revenues and functions of a church office — the power to ordain, administer sacraments, collect Peter's Pence. Temporalities were the civil-law property interests attached to the same office. The distinction mattered enormously for jurisdiction: temporalities could be addressed in royal courts; spiritualities could not, at least in theory.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
TEMPORALITIES (plural, most common form): The specific material revenues and property interests of a church or ecclesiastical office. When lawyers and courts used this term, they almost always meant the plural form, referring to the aggregate secular assets of a see, monastery, or benefice.
LAITY/TEMPORALITY (collective noun): The body of secular persons. Rarer in strictly legal contexts, but appears in constitutional and ecclesiastical history.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational trap for modern researchers. Because contemporary usage of "temporal" and "temporality" almost always involves time, researchers reading historical ecclesiastical, constitutional, or property law texts may misread occurrences of this word entirely. The ecclesiastical-property meaning dominated legal usage from medieval times through at least the nineteenth century.
In the Law Mind corpus, expect to encounter this term primarily in:
- Ecclesiastical law materials dealing with benefices, sees, and church property
- Constitutional history touching on the relationship between Crown and Church, particularly disputes over the rights to appoint bishops and control church revenues
- Property law discussions about the alienability or seizability of church-held lands
- Parliamentary materials, where the "Lords Spiritual and Temporal" distinction echoes the same underlying concept
The historical dictionaries are consistent but thin. All three source dictionaries define the term in one line or less, focusing exclusively on the laity meaning. None addresses the property meaning despite it being the more legally consequential of the two definitions. Webster's 1913 is actually more useful here than the legal dictionaries for capturing the property-revenue sense. Researchers relying solely on Black's or Bouvier's will miss the dominant legal application.
Jurisdictional and temporal scope: This term is essentially a term of English law and canon law. It carries little independent significance in American law after the disestablishment of religion, though traces appear in colonial-era ecclesiastical disputes and in property law cases involving church lands. In English legal history, the concept was live from the Norman Conquest through the Reformation and remained formally relevant well into the nineteenth century.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's — define temporality solely as "the laity" and offer nothing further. This is a rare instance where the historical legal dictionaries are materially incomplete. The property-revenue meaning of temporalities was central to centuries of English ecclesiastical and constitutional conflict, including disputes over investiture, praemunire, and the relationship between royal and papal authority over church appointments. The dictionaries' silence on this dimension reflects either the term's declining significance by the time these works were compiled, or an editorial assumption that readers of ecclesiastical law materials already understood the usage.
Webster's 1913 captures both the "temporary" (duration) meaning and the "material interests and revenues of an ecclesiastic" meaning — and actually provides the more useful legal definition of the two, noting that the term was "chiefly used in the plural" when referring to ecclesiastical revenues. The citation to "Supreme head... of the spirituality and temporality" reflects the Henrician Reformation's formal vocabulary for dividing ecclesiastical governance into its spiritual and material dimensions.
The Wiktionary definition (time-boundedness) is accurate for modern philosophical use but should not be imported into historical legal analysis.
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Jurisdictional Note
Temporality as a legal term of art is substantially an English and canon law concept. American law has no direct equivalent, and the term rarely appears in U.S. legal sources without explicit reference to the ecclesiastical context. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or Continental ecclesiastical law will find analogous structures, but the precise vocabulary varies.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Ecclesiastical Property
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Church and State
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Benefice
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