Definition
Attilment is a historical legal term of Law French origin meaning equipment or fitting out. It appears in medieval English legal records to describe the act or state of equipping, furnishing, or providing necessary gear — most often in a military or feudal context, referring to the outfitting of men or vessels for service.
Why It Matters in Research
Attilment is a term of narrow historical use. Researchers encountering it in medieval or early modern English legal records should treat it as a term of feudal obligation and military provisioning rather than a general term for property or goods. It surfaces most reliably in records touching on knight service, naval preparation, or the administrative machinery of feudal tenure.
The principal trap for corpus researchers is confusing attilment with related Law French terms for property, chattels, or equipment in a commercial sense. The term is specifically bound to the notion of fitting out for service — the equipping act — not the equipment itself as a static category of property. This distinction matters when parsing the scope of obligations described in historical writs, inquisitions, or tenure records.
Researchers should also note that attilment sits near ATTINCTA in the historical record (Burrill's own entry places the two in sequence, with ATTINCTA appearing immediately after). The proximity is textual and alphabetical, not conceptual — ATTINCTA, derived from the Latin attingere, belongs to an entirely different legal family concerned with attainder and touching. Cross-contamination in transcription or indexing is possible in digitized corpus sources.
Because attilment is a Law French term recorded primarily through Kelham's glossary of Norman-French legal terms (as Burrill cites), researchers working in primary sources should expect variant spellings and irregular appearances. Kelham's glossary is a secondary reconstruction of Law French usage, not a primary record, and Burrill's entry inherits that indirection. Weight attilment citations accordingly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive entry among the historical shelf sources. The entry is brief: Burrill defines attilment as "equipment; fitting out" and attributes the definition to Kelham, signaling that this term reached nineteenth-century legal dictionaries through antiquarian reconstruction of Law French rather than through sustained doctrinal use. Burrill does not elaborate on the legal context in which attilment appeared, its procedural significance, or the nature of the obligation it described.
No competing or amplifying definition appears in the other major historical dictionaries of English law. The absence of attilment from Bouvier, Black, and similar American and English reference works confirms that the term did not achieve general circulation in common law doctrine. It is, for practical purposes, a term of medieval administrative and feudal record, recovered and preserved by legal antiquarians rather than developed by practitioners or courts.
The placement of attilment immediately before ATTINCTA in Burrill's text warrants a researcher's note: the two terms are unrelated in meaning and derivation, and their proximity is an artifact of alphabetical organization, not conceptual kinship.
Jurisdictional Note
Attilment is a term of English feudal law with no meaningful American reception. Researchers working in American legal materials will not encounter it in operative legal documents. Its relevance is confined to English medieval records and the antiquarian legal literature that catalogued them.