Definition
In old English legal practice, utas (also written utave in Law French) denotes the eighth day following any term or feast day, counted inclusively in the Roman manner — that is, the feast day itself counts as day one, making the utas the seventh day after. The term is equivalent to the Latin octava (octave). It appears most commonly in early English year books and pleading records as a temporal reference point marking the outer boundary of a procedural window or the return day of a writ. Examples include the Utas of St. Michael (the eighth day after Michaelmas) and the Utas of St. Hilary (the eighth day after the feast of St. Hilary), both of which served as recognized dates in the English legal calendar for pleading and appearance purposes.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The octave, or seventh day after a festival — the eighth day counting inclusively in the ancient Roman manner.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The eighth day after any term or feast; the octave. Extended figuratively to mean festivity or merriment generally (now obsolete). Webster cites both Cowell and Holinshed, and notes Shakespeare's usage in the festive sense.
The legal meaning and the common historical meaning are nearly identical here — both draw from the same ecclesiastical and Roman calendar tradition. The minor research gap is directional: the common literary tradition (Shakespeare, Holinshed) extended utas toward a general sense of celebration, while the legal usage remained strictly technical and temporal. A researcher encountering utas in a non-legal historical text should not assume a precise procedural meaning.
Common Confusion
Utas is occasionally misread as a variant spelling of "oaths" or confused with "octave" in its musical sense. Neither confusion applies. The connection to octave is structural, not musical — it reflects Roman inclusive counting of feast-day intervals. Separately, Burrill's entry conflates two distinct headwords by appending a definition of uterine (ex eodem utero, of the same mother) directly to the utas entry. This appears to be a typographical or editorial error in Burrill's original text. Researchers using Burrill's should treat the uterine material as a separate entry that follows, not as part of the definition of utas.
Why It Matters in Research
Utas is almost exclusively a term of historical English practice with no modern procedural counterpart. It appears most frequently in Year Book entries and early common law pleading records from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, where feast days anchored the legal calendar. Understanding utas is therefore a prerequisite for correctly reading return dates and appearance deadlines in pre-modern English litigation records.
The key navigational point: when a Year Book or early plea roll specifies an appearance "in the utas of" a named feast, the researcher must know both the feast date and the inclusive Roman counting method to calculate the actual calendar date intended. A mistake in either element will misplace the procedural moment.
The term also illustrates the tight interweaving of ecclesiastical and legal calendars in English practice — a pattern that runs throughout pre-Reformation common law procedure and that researchers will encounter repeatedly when working with Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter, and Trinity terms.
Utas does not survive in any recognized modern legal system. Its appearance in a source is a reliable signal that the document or authority is either historical or quoting from historical sources. Finding utas in a secondary source without clear historical attribution warrants scrutiny.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Burrill's — agree on the core definition: utas means the octave, or eighth day following a term or feast, equivalent to the Latin octava. All three cite Cowell's Interpreter as their primary authority, which is appropriate given Cowell's systematic treatment of old English legal vocabulary.
Burrill's adds Year Book value by citing Yearb. H. 9 Edw. III. 4 and Dyer 78, giving the term documentary grounding in actual pleading practice. Black's editions do not add this depth, limiting themselves to the Cowell reference. For corpus research purposes, Burrill's entry is the more useful of the historical sources precisely because it points toward primary materials.
Webster's 1913 usefully adds Holinshed's chronicle citation, confirming that utas was current in educated general English writing well into the sixteenth century — not merely a technical term confined to legal professionals.
No historical source addresses the Burrill typographical conflation with uterine discussed above. Researchers relying solely on Burrill's without cross-checking Black's may carry a confused understanding of the entry's scope.
Jurisdictional Note
Utas is a term of old English practice and has no application in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions as a procedural term. It is relevant only in the context of English legal history, particularly pre-seventeenth-century pleading and Year Book research.