Definition
A second writ of attachment issued against a party who was previously attached and then discharged — not on the merits — but because the court failed to convene or some comparable procedural casualty prevented the matter from proceeding. The discharge in these circumstances was characterized as being "without day" (sine die), meaning the party was released without a future court date being set, through no fault of the proceedings on the substance of the case. Reattachment restored the court's hold on the person or property by issuing fresh process, picking up where the original attachment left off.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of reattaching; a second or subsequent attachment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of reattaching; a second attachment.
The ordinary sense of "reattachment" — simply fastening something again — maps loosely onto the legal sense but misses what is legally significant: the specific procedural trigger. In law, reattachment was not simply any second use of attachment process. It was a distinct remedy available only when the prior discharge resulted from a court-side failure rather than from a ruling against the attaching party. A researcher reading the common meaning would not grasp why reattachment was necessary or when it was available.
Why It Matters in Research
Reattachment is a term of historical English practice with virtually no footprint in modern American or Commonwealth procedural law. Researchers encountering it in older records, pleading books, or form registers should treat it as a signal that the document dates to a period when original writs and the Registers of Original Writs governed common law process — roughly pre-nineteenth century English practice.
The critical research trap is conflating reattachment with a simple renewal or re-issuance of attachment process generally. Reattachment had a specific occasion: the court's failure to sit (justices not arriving, sessions not held), not the plaintiff's default or the court's ruling on the merits. This distinction matters when tracing the procedural history of an older case — a reattachment in the record means the underlying matter survived despite a missed session and that the defendant was not considered finally discharged.
Researchers working in colonial American records, early federal equity practice, or English ecclesiastical and common law proceedings may encounter the term. It does not appear in modern civil procedure codes or rules-based systems, which handle missed sessions through continuance and rescheduling rather than fresh process.
The citation to "Reg. Orig. 35" in both Black's editions refers to the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Register of Original Writs), a foundational reference work of English common law practice listing the forms of writs available in the royal courts. This source places reattachment firmly within the writ-based procedural world and confirms the term's archaic character.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary reproduce identical language, verbatim, drawn directly from the Registrum Omnium Brevium. Neither edition elaborates beyond that single-sentence definition. The absence of expansion across editions suggests the term was already archaic by the time Black's first edition appeared and that no significant doctrinal development occurred in the interim.
The historical dictionaries capture the mechanism accurately — a second attachment following a discharge without day — but provide no guidance on how frequently the remedy was used, whether courts required fresh affidavit or showing of cause, or how reattachment interacted with the underlying merits. Researchers requiring that level of detail will need to consult the original writ registers and English procedural treatises of the period, not the dictionary literature.
Jurisdictional Note
Reattachment as a distinct procedural category belongs exclusively to historical English common law practice organized around original writs. It has no recognized counterpart in modern American, English, or Commonwealth civil procedure.