Definition
An obsolete Anglo-Norman French form of ATTAINT. In medieval English legal usage, atteynte referred to the writ and proceeding by which a jury of twenty-four knights or gentlemen was convened to review and potentially reverse a verdict rendered by a common jury of twelve, on the ground that the original jury had given a false verdict. If the grand jury of twenty-four found the original verdict false, the original jurors were subject to severe punishment — loss of lands, goods, and civil standing — and the judgment against the losing party was reversed.
The term also carried the broader sense of attainder: the legal consequence of conviction for treason or felony, by which the condemned person suffered corruption of blood, forfeiture of property, and civil death.
Common Confusion
ATTEYNTE, ATTAINT, and ATTAINDER are closely related but not identical. Atteynte and attaint are variant spellings of the same term, the former being the Anglo-Norman French form preserved in early legal manuscripts, the latter the anglicized form that entered standard legal usage. Attainder, while derived from the same root concept of being "touched" or tainted by crime, refers specifically to the legal consequences flowing from a judgment of conviction for treason or felony — not to the jury-review proceeding. Researchers working in medieval and early modern sources will encounter all three forms and must read context carefully to determine which sense is operative.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a finding of historical legal sources. Researchers will encounter atteynte primarily in Anglo-Norman legal manuscripts, Year Books, and early abridgments. It does not appear in modern statutory or case law in any operative sense.
Two distinct traps await the unwary researcher. First, the spelling variation is significant: atteynte, attaint, atteint, and attainder all appear in overlapping historical periods and corpora, and automated searches that retrieve one form may miss the others entirely. A thorough search of the Law Mind corpus for any of these concepts requires running all variant spellings.
Second, the dual meaning of the term — the jury-review proceeding on one hand, and attainder (civil death following conviction) on the other — means that a source using atteynte or attaint may be addressing an entirely different legal institution depending on context and period. The jury-attaint proceeding was largely obsolete by the seventeenth century, replaced by the motion for new trial; attainder persisted longer and carries constitutional significance in American law through the Bill of Attainder clauses of Article I. Conflating the two produces significant analytical error.
Researchers tracing the history of jury review and fact-finding correction will find atteynte relevant as the earliest formal mechanism for challenging a jury verdict — a precursor to the modern new trial. Researchers focused on punishment and constitutional limits on legislative power will find attainder (the related but distinct concept) more directly relevant.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the entry in minimal form: "L. Fr. Attaint; an attaint. Britt. c. 98." The citation is to Britton, the late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise attributed to John le Breton, which is one of the primary sources for this term in its earliest technical usage. Burrill's terseness is itself informative — by the time of his compilation, atteynte was thoroughly archaic, warranting only a cross-reference to its anglicized cognate rather than independent treatment.
Older English legal dictionaries, including Termes de la Ley and Cowell's Interpreter, treat attaint at greater length and address both the jury-proceeding sense and the attainder sense, reflecting the term's dual currency in earlier centuries. Scholars working with Britton or the Year Books should consult those sources directly, as Burrill does not capture the procedural mechanics of the attaint of jury.
What the historical dictionary record largely omits is a clear chronology of the term's obsolescence. The jury-attaint writ had fallen into effective disuse well before it was formally abolished in England by statute in the nineteenth century, and legal dictionaries of the intervening period tend to reproduce earlier definitions without flagging that the proceeding had become a dead letter.
Jurisdictional Note
The atteynte proceeding as a jury-review mechanism was an institution of English common law and was never transplanted in operative form to American jurisdictions. The constitutional prohibition on bills of attainder (Article I, Sections 9 and 10 of the U.S. Constitution) preserves the term attainder in American law, but atteynte itself has no American legal application.