The time frame “a year and a day” is mentioned occasionally or used (as in “I pledge to study a year and a day) in the Pagan community. Does anyone know the origins of this?
Hopefully, an answer will take less time. 
Thanks!
I don’t know from pagan circles, but it also is big in criminal folklore. If you’re sentenced to a year behind bars, and you behave yourself, you get half that time off for good behavior. Supposedly, if the judge says, “a year and a day,” you half to serve the entire year and a day.
Here’s a relevant Wikipedia article.
What I’ve read is that Midsummer Day was considered a “day out of time” and thus a full year was considered “a year and a day”. IIRC this is something I read in a Pagan publication, so take it with a grain of salt.
There is no real doubt that the original use was the legal one, as, for example, in clause 32 of Magna Carta. It was a way of saying that a time period should be a year, but that those concerned should err on the side of waiting until the final day had elapsed so that there could be no doubt that the full year was up. In other words, it served a strictly practical purpose.
Of course, it later became a phrase used by tellers of folk tales (because it sounded very formal?) and so acquired literary overtones. From which (much, much more recently) neo-pagans will have picked it up. Its origins are thus rather more prosaic than they might want to believe.
I don’t get the pagan angle, or rather, never understood that there was one. Anyone care to clarify?
I was looking over some very old (1960s/70s U.K.) house leases and the leases were always for a year less a day, otherwise the tenant gained some privileges (which were mentioned in the covering letter but I forget the details).
Whenever I have heard it, I got the sense the day was added to add an amount of accuracy to the length of time. If someone just says a year, they could mean sometime next year, next spring, 10 or 11 months, or anything between one and two years. A year and a day is pretty specific.
FWIW - Several handfasting ceremonies I’ve seen have been for a year and a day (unless a child is conceived)
Don’t know about that; it sounds unlikely. Here in Minnesota, anything that happens after the Judge gives a sentence is determined by the Parole Board; the original Judge is not involved.
But there is one definite factor: here, as in many states, sentences of less than one year are served in the local county jail. A year or more, the convicted person is sent off to the State Prison system. That is much more expensive to operate. So Judges will give sentences of “360 days” or “a year less one day” so that the person stays in the much cheaper county jail, thus saving the taxpayers money.
It’s all the more specific because it calls attention to the calendar year, not any of the other “years” people plan their lives by. In Magna Carta days people might have thought first of the Christian liturgical year, which varies in exact length because Easter has no fixed date. Today “year” in common usage might mean the school or academic year (wildly varying in length), or a corporation’s fiscal year.
Does anyone know if “year and a day” sentences took any account of leap years, or if Pagan or handfasting “year and a day” terms adjust during leap years?