A difficult issue in defining murder is whether an act causes the death of another. Because of the difficulty in establishing this, many common law jurisdictions apply the ancient "year and a day", providing culpability only if the victim of an act dies within a year and a day.
In medieval times, an "outlaw" was a person who placed himself outside the law and any protection it might offer him by perfroming a criminal act. The outlaw could escape the consequences of his action if he could escape capture for a year and a day.
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Medieval townsmen were free and did not have a feudal lord. This provided considerable incentive for serfs to run away to the emerging towns from whence, if they could evade capture for a year and a day, they could not be compelled to return to the manor.
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Time immemorial is time extending beyond the reach of memory, record, or tradition, implying that the subject referred to is, or can be regarded as, indefinitely ancient. This has been defined more precisely for various uses.
In English law, time immemorial, meaning "a time before legal history, and beyond legal memory" was considered an indefinite time until 1276 when it was fixed by statute as the beginning of the reign of King Richard I in the year 1189 making proof of unbroken possession or use of any right since that date sufficient without the need to establish the original grant.
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Many early legal documents, particularly wills, use the phrase ". . . for time without mind " to denote existence since before the known memory of any living person.
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An attempt in 1832 to date legal memory from a fixed time was abandoned. Instead, the principle was substituted that rights which had been enjoyed for a full twenty years (or thirty years as against the Crown) should not be liable to impeachment merely by proving that they had not been enjoyed before.
For the purposes of Heraldry, the Court of Chivalry is said to have defined "time immemorial " as before 1066.
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