This year's topic has been chosen with the approaching Millennium in mind. Since the pundits are not even agreed on when the new millennium starts, we felt free to indulge our fancy and examine different aspects of Time in a more general sense. "Time is of the essence" is a maxim familiar to modern lawyers, to whom the meaning is (as with most maxims) eternally in dispute. Time is obviously equally a theme of constant interest to students of literature. It is, of course, one of Aristotle's three dramatic Unities and may as such have shaped the literature of Law.

We welcome papers on any temporal aspect of medieval Law as Culture, and list below only a few initial suggestions.

• Time is of the Essence" The legal importance of this tag are evident from legal textbooks. One need only mention the need to deliver a cargo of bananas before they rot. Time is clearly of the essence of such contracts. But Law is ruled in a more general sense by time, with the need to make appearances in court on days fixed in advance, to keep one's terms etc. And these constraints can be put to literary work too, as in the tense waits to see if the fairy guarantor, the surprise witness or key evidence will emerge in time to save the hero's skin.
• Cooling Time This is a lawyers' term for the time allowed to recover "cool blood" after provocation. Leave your response too long and you will not be permitted the defenses of provocation and self-defense. (Why were these defenses never gendered before the Bobbit Case of our own days?) Similar rules cover the right to self-help (4 days to regain possession of land after ejection in Anglo-Norman law).
• Then there is Quarantine, a period of 40 days used as a time limit for a whole number of purposes, among them a widow's occupation of her home after her husband's death; the King's Truce in France (within which kinsmen and associates must decide whether or not to join a private war). Why 40 days?
• Prescription and Limitation How long delay is too long? If I neglect to challenge the illegal possession of my property for too long (30 years is a common figure), I may be barred for ever from doing so. This is Prescription. Many legal remedies are limited by their ever hoipeful framers to "recent" events and wrongs. Thus one could sue in "Novel" Disseizin only for acts committed since (for example) "the king's last crossing to France" or "the king's first coronation". But ...
• "Time does not run against the King" Kings can recaim their lost rights at any time. Why so favored?
• Time Immemorial How and why did the legal limit of time "beyond which the memory of Man does not run" get fixed at Richard I's coronation, 1189? What were the equivalents elsewhere? What implications did the whole notion have for the scope of oral memory? What literary themes stem from or are related to this? Surprise witness who recall the true circumstances of a hero's birth and blood are not limited to Victorian melodramas. What other roles does the (limited) role of Memory play in literary depictions of Law?
• Time Measurement was quite important in an age when the great problem of litigation was to get your opponent in court at the same time as you and the judges. Having "your day in court" is a phrase with a medieval origin. To make it come true, those concerned needed to be able to agree on how to calculate and define the day, term and year with precision. Did this require an official legal calendar of Saints' Days and Holidays, the original "Red Letter Days"?
• The Time of Your Life The influence of the human life cycle. You have to be of age to make full use of the Law. Those under age will in the middle ages be under someone else's custody (Wardship, Fosterage, Nurturing). The aged may be so too, once they are beyond running their own lives. So we find maintenance arrangements of every kind, also schemes for transferring property and power to the young while their elders still live. Hence the different attitude of the Law toward Deathbed Grants as against ones made at other times?
• Mortmain and Eternity Those already dead can presumably not be affected by legal time. The best example is the saint who having   died once will never do so again. Yet these dead saints, in the form of undying monasteries and other ecclesiastical corporations, hold much property. The Law use the evocative negative image of the "dead hand" to describe the blighting effect of such grants from a secular point of view. Their lands are eternally free from the incidents that normally occur on a tenant's death. Lawyers also constantly talk of eternity in the form of perpetual grants, though only Jewish draftsmen (in my limited knowledge) refer to debts (for example) contracted since the Creation of the World. When if ever does the End of the World, the Second Coming carry legal effects?
• Precedent and Memory  In what way did real and literary courts use memories of previous decisions to guide them in deciding cases before them? How might the act of "following custom" have developed into being "bound by precedent" ("stare decisis")? How, more generally did courts and their members use memory? Do new laws always supersede older ones?