Definition
Attiles (also rendered attilium, pl. attilia; variant forms atilium, actilia) is an archaic legal term drawn from Law Latin and Law French denoting the rigging, tackle, or stores of a ship — that is, the ropes, cordage, fittings, and gear necessary for a vessel's operation. In early English legal records, attiles appears in the context of maritime property descriptions, identifying the equipment and appurtenances of a ship as distinct from the vessel itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval and early English maritime records, Exchequer memoranda, or admiralty pleadings may encounter this term in inventories, writs, or enrolled accounts describing ships and their appurtenant property. The term signals a boundary question that mattered practically: whether a conveyance, forfeiture, or seizure of a vessel included its rigging and tackle, or whether attiles were treated as separable property. Researchers should be alert to the variant spellings — attiles, attilium, attilia, atilium, actilia — which appear inconsistently across manuscript sources and printed calendars, and may be indexed differently or not at all in finding aids. Failure to search variant forms will produce incomplete results. The term is period-specific to medieval English practice and does not carry forward into modern maritime law in any recognized form; modern equivalents include terms such as tackle, apparel, and appurtenances, which have their own legal histories and should not be assumed synonymous without period-specific verification.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the primary surviving lexicographic treatment, identifying attiles as a Law French term meaning "stores" (citing Kelham's Norman-French glossary) and attilium/attilia as the Law Latin equivalent meaning the rigging or tackle of a ship. Burrill illustrates the term with reference to Memoranda in Scaccario (Exchequer Memoranda) from the reigns of Edward I (4 Edw. I and 24 Edw. I), quoting the phrases navem cum attilio decenti (a ship with proper rigging) and naves et attilia (ships and their tackle). These citations ground the term firmly in royal administrative and fiscal records of the late thirteenth century.
No other source dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus independently treat this term. Researchers relying solely on later legal dictionaries — including Bouvier, Black, or Tomlin — will find no entry and should treat Burrill as the primary lexicographic authority. The cross-references to atilium and actilia in Burrill suggest that these were recognized as variant forms by legal antiquaries, but the distinctions between forms, if any existed in practice, are not elaborated in surviving lexicographic sources. Kelham's glossary of Norman-French legal terms remains the closest parallel authority for the Law French rendering.
Jurisdictional Note
Attiles is specific to medieval English legal and administrative practice, appearing primarily in Exchequer and admiralty contexts. It has no recognized equivalent in Scottish, Irish, or continental civil law sources and does not appear in American legal materials.