Immemorial

The other day, we tweeted this:

The legal term TIME IMMEMORIAL originally strictly referred to any event occurring before 6 July 1189.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) June 6, 2015

Frankly, it sounds made up:

@HaggardHawks - really truly??? I want to believe, but...

— MmeBlahblatsky (@MmeBlahblatsky) June 7, 2015

But, in fact, this bizarre quirk of legal terminology is entirely true.

The word immemorial literally means “unrememberable”, or “beyond memory”. Although it’s occasionally found on its own (Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Princess, for one), by and large it’s now considered an example of a “fossil” word—an archaism that only survives in the language in one solitary fixed expression or cliché, like the beck of “beck and call”, the kith of “kith and kin”, or the riddance of “good riddance”. (Shameless plug: there’s more on that in the book.)

The sole expression this particular fossil finds itself embedded in dates back a little over 400 years: the OED has unearthed the earliest record of time immemorial in a document drawn up by Richard Cosin, a sixteenth century ecclesiastical lawyer, in 1593. But the legal concept of time immemorial—referring to a time beyond legal memory, which can be used to establish long-term rights of ownership—dates back considerably further than that.

During his 35 year reign from 1272-1307, Edward I oversaw the institution of three so-called Statutes of Westminster, a set of formal legal documents that attempted to codify all the laws of England and thereby establish a new and fully comprehensive English legal system. Ironically, the foundations of this fully comprehensive English legal system were written in French—or rather Old French—which, two centuries after the Norman Conquest, was still the language of the law and government in England.

Edward I: Hammer of the Scots. Holder of the Long Thin Stick.

The First Statute was drawn up in 1275, and comprised a total of 51 clauses or “chapters”, each of which set out various rules, writs, laws, and legal definitions. Clause 4, for instance, outlined the legality surrounding shipwrecks:

On a wreck of the sea, it is agreed that when a man, a dog, or a cat escapes alive from a ship, neither the ship nor the boat nor anything that was in them shall be adjudged a wreck.

Clause 5, The Freedom of Election Act, is still in force in England and Wales, seven centuries later:

Because elections ought to be free, the king forbids … any man, great or otherwise, to interfere by force of arms or by malicious conduct with the making of a free election.

Clause 34 outlawed slander:

Because many [people] have often invented and told lying tales … it is forbidden … for anyone henceforward to be so bold as to utter or repeat false news or fabrications whence any discord, or intention of discord or slander could arise between the king and his people.

And Clause 39, known as “The Limitation of Prescription Act”, set out to define a standardized cut-off point for legal ownership—a precise date against which all grievances over ownership of land or property could be measured and determined:

No one is to be given a hearing to claim seisin [feudal ownership of land] by an ancestor of his further back than the time of King Richard, uncle of King Henry, the father of the present king.

Effectively, this meant that if you had your ownership of a given property or plot of land challenged by writ of right, all you had to do to quash the challenge was prove that you and your ancestors had maintained ownership of said property since before Richard I became king. The First Statute of Westminster ultimately established the date of Richard’s ascendancy—6 July 1189—as the cut off point for living memory, or the time “whereof the memory of Man runneth not to the contrary”. Anything that occurred before that date was thereby deemed to be beyond living memory, or, in legal parlance at least, time immemorial.

This definition remained in force in England and Wales right through to 1832, when it was finally figured out that being compelled to demonstrate ancestral ownership of something for 643 years could prove somewhat tricky. As a result, shortly before his death, William IV passed The Prescription Act that shortened the legally required length of ownership or use of a contested property to anything between 20 and 60 years, depending on its use. 

This remains the standard requirement for disputes of ownership in England and Wales, and consigned the legal definition of time immemorial to the history books. Although the phrase itself—albeit a fossilized one—still lives on.
  

Eleven

A few days ago, we tweeted this:

ELEVEN literally means "one left above ten".
— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) March 20, 2015

Which led to this:

@HaggardHawks I've love to see evolution of that if you have it. I've always wondered why we use eleven instead of "one-teen" or something!
— Brian Conor (@iambriam) March 20, 2015

It’s a good question—why do we say eleven and twelve, but then thirteen and fourteen? Why not oneteen and twoteen? Or threelve and fourlve?

Unsurprisingly the –teen suffix is a derivative of ten. Thirteen is literally “three and ten”, fourteen is “four and ten”, and so on. It’s a fairly ancient formation: thirteen was þreotene right back in Old English, a straightforward compound of þreo, “three”, and tene, a form of “ten”. The same goes for fourteen (derived from Old English feowertyne), and fifteen (Old English fiftene), all the way up to twenty—which was twentig, or literally “two groups of ten”.

But eleven was enleofan in Old English, which took its initial en– from the Old English word for “one”, ane. Twelve, likewise, was twelf, with its initial twe– taken from the Old English “two”, twa. The remaining –leofan and –elf parts have noting to do with the “teen” suffix, but instead represent hangovers from some ancient, pre-Old English word, probably meaning “to leave over”, or “to omit”. So eleven was literally the number “left over” after you’d counted up to ten, and twelve was literally “two left over after ten”. 

But why were eleven and twelve given different names from all the other teens? Why weren’t they just ane-tene and twa-tene?

The problem is that we’re now hardwired to think of our numbers decimally—in 10s, 100s and 1000s. There’s a good reason for doing so, of course, because 10 is such an easy number to work with. You can count to 10 using your fingers (which is called dactylonomy, by the way), and calculations involving 10 are effortlessly simple. 79 multiplied by 10, you say? 790. Easy. But this decimal way of thinking is actually a relatively recent invention, spurred on by the development of the metric system in the Middle Ages. Historically, many of our numbering and measuring systems were based around 12, not 10—and hence there are twelve inches in a foot, and two sets of twelve hours in a day. 

It’s a much more complicated number to deal with arithmetically of course (79 multiplied by 12? Give me a minute...) but there’s a very practical reason for counting in terms of 12 rather than 10—because 12 is a much more mathematically productive number. 

A set of 10, for instance, can only be split equally into two sets of five, or five sets of two. A set of 12, however, can be split into 2, 3, 4 or 6. Likewise a set of 20 can only be divided into 2, 4, 5 or 10, but a set of 24 can be divided into 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 or 12. And even 100 has barely half the number of factors (2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50) than 144 (2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 24, 36, 48, 72). 

12 homemade cookies. Soon to be 0 homemade cookies.

The fact that 12 could be so conveniently divided in so many different ways made it particularly useful, in everyday terms, in dealing with fractions, proportions, allocations, and measurements. It even led to some separate words for a set of twelve (dozen) and a set of twelve twelves (gross) entering our language—and to many ancient number systems, including the one we use today, using a base of 12, not 10. Ultimately twelve, and thereby eleven, earned names distinct from all those numbers above them, and it’s only our modern, decimal-based perspective that makes this seem strange.

Oh—948! Got there eventually...