Definition
Attournance is an obsolete Law French form of the term now rendered in English as *attornment*. It denotes the act by which a tenant formally acknowledges and accepts a new lord or landlord — typically following a conveyance or transfer of the land on which the tenant holds — thereby continuing the feudal or tenurial relationship under the new grantor. The term captures the tenant's consent to the transfer of seigniory or reversion, signaling that the tenant will henceforth render services and obligations to the new holder rather than the old.
In practical terms, attournance was the formal mechanism that gave legal effect to the transfer of a landlord's interest as against the tenant. Without it, under classical common law doctrine, a conveyance of a reversion or seigniory was incomplete in the sense that the tenant owed no duty to the new lord until attournance had been made.
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Common Confusion
Attournance, attornment, and attorn are variants of the same root concept at different linguistic and historical stages. *Attournance* is the Law French spelling found in early English legal records and dictionaries; *attornment* is the anglicized noun form that survived into modern usage; *attorn* is the verb. Researchers encountering *attournance* in a source should treat it as functionally identical to *attornment* and search under both forms. Separately, *attornment* should not be confused with *attorney* or *attorn* in the agency sense, though all derive from the same French root meaning to turn toward or assign to another.
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Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is navigational. Attournance appears almost exclusively in early English legal records, Year Books, and Law French materials. Any researcher working with pre-modern English property sources — particularly those predating the Statute of Frauds (1677) and the gradual obsolescence of feudal tenure formalities — may encounter the term and need to map it to the recognized doctrine of attornment.
**Spelling traps.** Law French orthography was never standardized, and attournance appears with variant spellings across manuscripts and printed abridgments. Researchers searching a corpus for this term should also run queries for *attournement*, *atournance*, *aturnance*, and cognate forms.
**The doctrine behind the word.** Understanding what attournance points to — the doctrine of attornment — is essential for interpreting conveyancing language in older deeds, leases, and records of manorial courts. The requirement of tenant's attournance to complete a transfer of reversion was a significant constraint on alienation of landed interests. Parliament progressively curtailed the requirement; by the eighteenth century, it had been largely abolished for most transactions by statute in England. American jurisdictions generally did not inherit the strict common law attournance requirement, though the concept survives in modified form in commercial lease practice (tenant acknowledgment of new landlord).
**Corpus connection.** Because Burrill uses this entry primarily to redirect readers to *attornment* and *attorn*, researchers using the Law Mind corpus should treat *attournance* as a gateway term and follow through to those main entries for substantive doctrine.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry for *attournance* is deliberately thin — a single cross-reference to the English *attornment*, with a note that the term is Law French, and a citation to Kelham's *Glossary of Norman and Old French Words* for the related root *attraire* (to draw to). This is consistent with Burrill's general practice of briefly logging archaic and foreign-language forms and redirecting readers to the anglicized entry carrying the doctrinal substance.
The Kelham citation is notable because it anchors the etymology (L. Fr. *attraire*, to draw to, to attract toward) without making it the focus of the legal definition — a sensible approach, since the legal significance lies in the act performed, not the linguistic genealogy. No other Law Mind shelf sources provide an independent entry for *attournance* specifically. Researchers wanting full historical dictionary treatment of the underlying doctrine should consult Burrill's entry for *Attornment* and, where available, older glossaries such as Cowell's *Interpreter* or Rastell's *Termes de la Ley*, which address feudal tenure vocabulary in detail.
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Jurisdictional Note
The technical requirement of attournance as a conveyancing formality is an artifact of English feudal land law and has no direct operational significance in modern American or Commonwealth jurisdictions. The underlying concept — a tenant's formal acknowledgment of a new landlord — survives in commercial real estate practice through estoppel certificates and non-disturbance and attornment agreements (SNDAs), but these are contractual instruments, not feudal formalities.
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