The paper considers one of the criteria for differentiating between a perfect and resultative meaning of the Old English habban+participle II construction, and namely, the use of temporal adverb ær. An in-depth investigation into the contexts, low frequency of examples in the corpus of Old English texts as well as the analysis of the semantics of the verbs used as past participles with the construction as compared to similar examples from the Middle English corpus allow us to assume that the adverb under consideration is employed in Old English in those meanings which underscore the statal resultative semantics of the habban+participle II construction.