Definition
The act by which a tenant acknowledges and accepts a new landlord or lord, transferring the existing tenancy relationship to a successor in interest. Attornment operates in two distinct but related contexts:
1. Feudal law. The formal acknowledgment by a tenant of a new lord following the grant or transfer of a seigniory. Where a lord conveyed his estate to another, the tenant's attornment was historically required to complete the transfer of feudal services and to bind the tenant to the new lord. Without it, the conveyance was considered incomplete as against the tenant.
2. Modern property and landlord-tenant law. The agreement — express or implied — by which a tenant recognizes a new owner of leased property as the landlord and agrees to hold under that owner's title. Attornment most commonly arises when leased property is sold, foreclosed upon, or transferred by operation of law. It is now frequently addressed by contract in subordination, non-disturbance, and attornment agreements (SNDAs), where tenants agree in advance to attorn to any successor landlord who acquires the property through foreclosure, provided the tenant's right to possession is not disturbed.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The consent of a tenant to the transfer of his relationship to his landlord to another person.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of a feudatory, vassal, or tenant, by which he consents, upon the alienation of an estate, to receive a new lord or superior, and transfers to him his homage and service.
The common and legal definitions track closely here, but ordinary usage does not capture the modern commercial significance of the term. Today, attornment is less often a spontaneous act of tenant acknowledgment and more often a contractually negotiated obligation embedded in complex commercial leases. A researcher encountering the word in a modern transactional context should look past the feudal framing and toward the SNDA framework.
Common Confusion
Attornment is sometimes confused with attorn, which is simply the verb form — to attorn means to perform the act; attornment is the act itself. More consequentially, attornment is occasionally conflated with subordination. They are distinct: subordination is the tenant's agreement that its leasehold interest ranks below a lender's mortgage lien; attornment is the tenant's agreement to recognize the lender (or buyer at foreclosure) as the new landlord if that lender takes title. Both typically appear in the same SNDA instrument, which causes the concepts to blur in practice and in secondary sources.
Why It Matters in Research
The feudal-to-modern trajectory of this term creates real navigational hazards. Sources predating the twentieth century treat attornment almost exclusively in its feudal context — the formal ceremonial act binding tenant to lord. Modern usage is almost entirely commercial and contractual, with the operative document being the SNDA rather than any common-law ceremony.
Researchers working in historical property law, particularly English land tenure and conveyancing before the Statute of Frauds era, will encounter attornment as a required formality. The requirement that tenants attorn to new lords was abolished or rendered unnecessary in many common law jurisdictions by statute — in England by the Landlord and Tenant Act 1709, and subsequently by analogous American legislation. A historical source that treats attornment as a mandatory validity requirement may be accurately describing the law of its time while being wholly inapplicable to any modern transaction.
In modern commercial real estate research, the term appears almost exclusively in the context of mortgage financing and leasehold priority disputes. The SNDA agreement has essentially codified and contractualized what was once a common-law formality. Corpus researchers should note that the SNDA framing is largely absent from pre-1950 legal literature, meaning the modern commercial doctrine must be pieced together from treatises on real estate finance, leasehold law, and commercial lending rather than from traditional property law sources.
Jurisdictional variation in how courts treat implied attornment — whether a tenant who pays rent to a new owner has thereby attorned — can affect landlord-tenant dispute research significantly. Check whether a given jurisdiction treats payment of rent as conclusive or merely presumptive evidence of attornment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary offers the most precise formulation, distinguishing three related acts: the lord's transfer of the tenant's services to the grantee; the tenant's own transfer of his services to the new lord; and the tenant's consent to or acknowledgment of the transfer. This tripartite structure reflects genuine ambiguity in the historical sources about who performs the act and what exactly it accomplishes — the lord's grant, the tenant's consent, or some combination of both.
Black's (both editions) define attornment primarily from the tenant's perspective — the act of the tenant by which he agrees to become the tenant of a stranger. This framing is closer to modern usage and easier to apply to contemporary landlord-tenant disputes, but it elides the feudal dimension that Burrill preserves.
Bouvier simply cross-references ATTORN without a standalone entry for ATTORNMENT, which is unhelpful for researchers who encounter the noun form first. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is not substantively useful for this term.
All historical sources agree on the core transaction: a change of landlord or lord, and a tenant's acknowledgment of that change. None anticipates the SNDA structure or the modern lender-driven context in which the doctrine now principally operates.
Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions have generally eliminated any requirement that a tenant's formal attornment be obtained to validate a conveyance of the fee. The practical question in modern litigation is whether a tenant has impliedly attorned to a successor landlord — typically by paying rent — and whether that implied attornment can be defeated by an express contractual provision. Courts vary on both questions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Landlord and Tenant; Feudal Tenure and Land Transfer; Subordination, Non-Disturbance, and Attornment Agreements.