How Long Is "Since Time Immemorial"? As Of Today, 836 Years And 193 Days

Legal pre-history

There’s a reason we talk about, say, Johns Wick or McClane “going medieval” on their enemies. Find yourself accused of a serious crime before the mid-13th century, at least in England, and forget about facing a jury of your peers – your fate was with God, and your innocence could only be proven by surviving some brutal ordeal: that of fire, water, or combat.

Criminal justice wasn’t the only rough-and-ready legal system in place. “Up until 1275, law in early medieval England was evolving,” explained History Hit’s Amy Irvine back in 2023, “and [it] relied heavily on the idea of long use, custom, and royal decrees.”

What was legal or permissible depended not so much on some officially approved central codex, but on various traditions and rough justice. Sometimes a royal proclamation would come down to shape some law or another, but they were usually single-use, intended “to address specific issues rather than establishing a comprehensive legal code,” Irvine wrote.

Towards the end of the century, though, that started to change. Magna Carta was signed in 1215; the legal system was becoming increasingly structured, and individual rights formalized. People finally had a way to prove officially that, say, a parcel of land belonged to them, rather than just relying on their neighbors’ goodwill to back their claim up – under the new system, all you needed to do was prove that land had belonged to you and yours for as long as anybody could remember. 

There was just one problem: how long, exactly, was that?

Cleaning up the mess

Before 1275, the biggest name in English legal history was Henry II. It was his reign that saw the creation of a unified “common law” – a semi-formal system based on tradition and judicial decisions, and one that still influences our legal system today. 

But as important as that step had been, the situation was still messy – so, in 1275, Edward I decided to clean things up. He passed the Statute of Westminster: a vast, comprehensive law in 51 chapters, which codified all the laws in England in a single piece of legislation.

“It was so wide and far-reaching that it might be called a code rather than an Act,” wrote historian James Franck Bright in his 1880 book The History of Medieval Monarchy in England (449 to 1485). “Its object is said by a contemporary writer to have been to ‘awake those languid laws which had long been lulled asleep’ by the abuses of the time.”

“It secured the rights of the Church, improved the tardy processes of law, and re-established the charters,” he wrote, “further limiting the sums which could be demanded for the three legal aids.”

But it was one particular part that would prove most important when it comes to defining human memory: clause 39. This, the Limitation of Prescription Act, gave a cut-off point for how long ago grievances could date from – specifically, if your proposed legal action relied on information from before 1189, it was invalid.

“The date of 1189 became the date of legal memory,” wrote Russell Sandberg, professor of law at Cardiff University, in his 2023 book A Historical Introduction to English Law. “[P]roving that something had happened since ‘time immemorial’ would require the claimant to prove that it had happened since 1189.”

“This cast the whole period up until the reforms of Henry II as the pre-history of the common law.”

Why 1189?

So, that’s the origin of the date – but, you might ask, why the heck would you choose 1189 as your kick-off point? It’s not a particularly round number; it’s neither a date relating to Henry II or Edward I – so why choose that year?

Well, it’s more sensible than it seems. 1189 was a reasonable enough distance from 1275 to define as the limit of living memory. “It was just possible that a living man should have been told by his father of what that father had seen in the year 1189,” mused Pollock and Maitland in their seminal History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, “and in a proprietary action for land the demandant's champion was allowed to speak of what his father had seen.”

Not only that, but it marked something of a turning point in how English law was understood. “Had Edward and his parliament been concerned to mark a boundary beyond which the history of English law could not be profitably traced for practical purposes, they could hardly have hit upon a better date,” Pollock and Maitland wrote. “The restless Henry had gone to his rest; his reforms were beginning to take effect; our first classical text-book had just been written; the strong central court was doing justice term after term on a large scale; it was beginning to have a written memory which would endure for all ages in the form of a magnificent series of judicial records.” 

Getting specific

Even more than all these features, though, 1189 had one thing going for it: it was the year Richard the Lionheart became king. That made it memorable to the people, and personally important for Edward: “Edward had been a crusader (returning from the Ninth Crusade on 2 August 1274 and crowned King of England on 19 August),” Irvine explained, “and it’s likely he chose that date to recall the last great crusading king.”

But defining the beginning of legal memory with a specific event like this means something else – we can get hyper-specific with it. Richard ascended the throne on July 6, 1189, and was crowned just under two months later – meaning that, legally speaking, at least, “time immemorial” began on September 3, 1189.

So: how long is “time immemorial”? Well, as of today, March 14, 2026, it’s exactly 836 years, 6 months, and 11 days. You know – not including the various calendar shenanigans of 1582.