Definition
An obsolete Law French form of the word attorney. The term appears in early English legal manuscripts and treatises as a variant spelling of *attorne*, denoting a person appointed or turned over to act in another's place — that is, one authorized to appear and act on behalf of another in legal proceedings or in the management of property and affairs.
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Common Confusion
ATTURNE, ATTORNE, and ATTORNEY are variant forms of the same root concept, not distinct legal offices. Researchers encountering any of these spellings in historical sources are looking at the same underlying term at different stages of spelling standardization. The modern *attorney* is the fully anglicized descendant; *attorne* and *atturne* are the Law French antecedents. Do not treat divergent spellings as divergent meanings.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term exists almost exclusively as a bibliographic and paleographic problem. A researcher will not encounter *atturne* in any modern legal instrument, statute, or judicial opinion. It surfaces in:
- **Medieval Year Books and plea rolls**, where Law French was the language of English common law pleading and record-keeping.
- **Early legal treatises**, including Britton (*Britt.*), where the term appears in discussions of representation and agency. Burrill's cross-reference to Britton, chapter 126, is the primary anchoring citation.
- **Manuscript sources** from roughly the 12th through 15th centuries, where spelling of Law French terms was inconsistent even within a single document.
The research trap here is straightforward: variant spellings can cause a term to disappear from index searches entirely. A corpus researcher searching only for *attorney* or *attorne* will miss instances of *atturne*, and vice versa. Any full-text search strategy for the historical concept of the attorney relationship in English law must account for all three spellings, plus additional variants such as *attorne*, *atturney*, and *attourney*.
Burrill's entry for *atturne* is intentionally minimal — a one-line cross-reference — because the substantive legal content lives under *attorne* and, in modern dictionaries, under *attorney*. The entry functions as a spelling redirect, not a standalone definition.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats *atturne* as a direct synonym and spelling variant, citing Britton and immediately routing the reader to *attorne*. No substantive legal definition is offered under this headword. This is consistent with how historical law dictionaries generally handled Law French spelling variants: they acknowledged them for lookup purposes without duplicating content.
What the historical dictionaries do not address — and what is worth flagging for corpus researchers — is the degree to which Law French spelling was itself unstandardized. Britton, one of the earliest systematic treatises on English law (composed circa late 13th century and attributed, at least by convention, to John le Breton), uses terminology that later copyists and editors reproduced inconsistently. The appearance of *atturne* in a manuscript source should prompt the researcher to check whether the edition being consulted modernizes or preserves original spelling, as this affects searchability across the corpus.
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Jurisdictional Note
As a Law French term, *atturne* is specific to the historical common law tradition of England and jurisdictions that inherited English common law. It has no independent life in civil law systems, Scottish law, or American legal usage at any period.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See the Law Mind Encyclopedia entries for **ATTORNEY** (for the developed legal concept of authorized representation) and **ATTORNMENT** (for the property law doctrine that shares this same Law French root, concerning a tenant's acknowledgment of a new landlord).
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