Definition
Attornatio is a Latin term from old English law meaning an attornment — the formal act by which a tenant acknowledged and accepted a new lord, transferring the tenant's feudal allegiance upon a change of lordship. The term captures the procedural moment at which a tenant was, in legal fiction, "turned" toward a new superior: the existing tenurial relationship was redirected rather than dissolved and remade.
In the feudal land system, land could not be simply transferred between lords without the tenant's participation. Attornatio was the tenant's formal consent to that transfer, without which the new lord's title over the tenancy was incomplete. The related agent-noun, ATTORNATUS (also spelled Atturnatus), denoted the person who had been so turned — one substituted or put in the place of another, a vicarious actor standing in for a principal.
Common Confusion
ATTORNATIO / ATTORNMENT / ATTORNEY: These three terms share a common root but diverge significantly by historical period and legal context. Attornatio is the medieval Latin noun for the act of attornment in a feudal sense. Attornment persisted longer in English law, eventually applied to tenant acknowledgment of new landlords in leasehold contexts, and vestiges survive in modern real property law. Attorney evolved independently into a term for a legal representative or agent, carrying almost none of the feudal tenurial meaning of its ancestor. Using these terms interchangeably across time periods will produce analytical errors.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering attornatio in medieval sources are working within a strictly feudal context. The term appears in Bracton and similar early common law materials and will not surface meaningfully after the decline of feudal tenure in English law. Its practical significance largely dissolved after the Statute of Uses (1536) and the Tenures Abolition Act (1660) reshaped the tenurial landscape.
The critical navigational point: do not read attornatio anachronistically through the lens of the modern attorney-client relationship. The modern word "attorney" descends from the same Latin root (attornare — to turn over to, to appoint), but the institutional and functional gap between a feudal attorney and a modern attorney-at-law is enormous. Sources from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries using attornatus may be describing a feudal substitute or a party to an attornment transaction, not a legal advocate or counsel.
Corpus researchers should also note that Burrill cross-indexes attornatio with attornatus, treating the noun of action and the agent-noun together. This is editorially sound but can obscure the distinction between the act (the attornatio itself) and the status of the person who underwent it (the attornatus). When reading medieval pleading records or land transaction documents, distinguishing which concept the source is invoking matters for understanding the legal posture of the parties.
Bracton's folio 79b, cited by Burrill, is the anchor text for this term in the common law tradition. Researchers needing the full context should consult that passage directly, as Burrill's treatment is a compressed reference rather than an exposition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the principal shelf source for this term and provides a spare but accurate entry: attornatio is glossed as "an attornment," with the immediate citation to Bracton. Burrill then extends the discussion to the related term ATTORNATUS, defining it as one who has been attorned, a substitute or vicarious actor. The etymological note — ad turnum alterius, meaning "to the turn of another" — is preserved in Burrill's entry and is genuinely useful for understanding how the term was conceptualized: the tenant was turned, redirected in fealty, not simply reassigned by external decree.
No other shelf sources in the current corpus treat this term independently. Burrill's entry, while brief, aligns with what Bracton and the broader medieval common law literature establish. Researchers requiring deeper treatment should look to specialized works on medieval English land law rather than expecting general legal dictionaries to carry the full analysis.