Definition
An archaic Law French spelling of TENANT, used in old English legal records and pleading. The term carried two related but distinct senses in historical practice:
1. A person who holds land or tenement from a superior lord; one bound by the tenurial relationship to render service or payment in return for possession of land.
2. The defendant in a real action — that is, the party against whom a writ was brought to recover freehold land or some interest in it. In the formulaic language of the old real actions, the tenaunt was the counterpart to the demandant (the party asserting title), and the pleadings were structured around the tenaunt's appearance, default, or vouching of a warrantor.
The term appears in Middle English legal records, Year Books, and treatises such as Britton, where it surfaces in stock pleading phrases tracking whether the tenaunt appeared on the return day of the summons.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "tenant."
Historical common usage: Not independently listed in Webster's 1913; the base word "tenant" is defined there as one who holds or possesses lands or tenements by any kind of title, or one who occupies the land or property of another.
The gap worth noting: in modern common usage, "tenant" almost exclusively suggests a lessee — someone who pays rent for temporary occupancy. In the historical legal sense preserved by "tenaunt," the word describes a feudal holder whose relationship to the land was defined by tenure and service, not by a term or lease. The further technical sense — defendant in a real action — has no modern common equivalent at all, as real actions themselves were abolished in England by the Real Property Limitation Act 1833 and its successors.
Common Confusion
TENAUNT / TENANT: These are the same word at different historical moments of spelling. Researchers should not treat them as distinct legal concepts. Variant spellings in Law French and early Middle English records — tenaunt, tenaunte, tenaunt — all resolve to tenant. The confusion risk is paleographic and indexing-related: a keyword search for "tenant" in a corpus of medieval or early modern records may miss instances spelled in the Law French form.
TENAUNT (defendant in real action) / DEFENDANT (modern): The procedural role of tenaunt in a real action is not equivalent to "defendant" in a modern civil action. The real action framework involved specific procedural steps — essoins, vouching to warranty, the grand cape and petit cape — that have no modern counterpart. Treating the tenaunt simply as "the defendant" flattens important procedural meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with Year Books, Britton, Bracton, or any pleading records predating the decline of real actions will encounter "tenaunt" as a term of art with procedural weight, not mere descriptive label. Key navigational points:
First, the spelling variation is significant for corpus searching. Law French records are inconsistent in orthography; tenaunt, tenant, and tenaunte may all appear in the same document or set of records. Any search strategy for historical land law materials needs to account for these variants.
Second, the procedural sense — tenaunt as defendant in a real action — is the technically precise meaning in pleading contexts. When Britton says "le tenaunt nent" (the tenant did not appear), this is a statement about default in a real action with specific procedural consequences, not merely a landlord-tenant relationship observation.
Third, the feudal tenure sense and the procedural sense often overlap in the same case: the person defending title in a real action was typically also a tenant in the tenurial sense, holding from some mesne lord or the crown. But they are analytically separable, and Burrill's entry correctly preserves both.
Fourth, researchers should note that the abolition of real actions in English law renders the procedural sense a purely historical artifact. American jurisdictions largely inherited English common law forms but moved away from real actions early; the procedural tenaunt is therefore primarily relevant to English legal history research rather than American practice history.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary historical source for this entry. Burrill correctly identifies both the tenurial and the procedural senses, and his citation to Britton (c. 27) anchors the procedural usage in one of the most important Anglo-Norman legal texts of the late thirteenth century. Britton, written in Law French and attributed to the reign of Edward I, was a foundational source for English practitioners well into the early modern period, making Burrill's citation genuine and instructive.
Burrill's quoted passage — "Si le garaunt veigne al jour que il serra somouns, et le pleyntyfe ausi, et le tenaunt nent" — translates roughly as: "If the warrantor comes on the day he shall be summoned, and the plaintiff also, and the tenant does not." This fragment captures the real action procedural moment perfectly: the three-party structure of demandant, tenaunt, and the vouched warrantor, and the consequences of non-appearance.
No other historical dictionaries are available for this entry. Researchers consulting Black's Law Dictionary (any edition) or Bouvier's Law Dictionary will find the term subsumed under TENANT without separate treatment of the Law French spelling. This is appropriate for those dictionaries' purposes but means the specifically procedural and paleographic dimensions are underserved outside Burrill.
Jurisdictional Note
The procedural sense of tenaunt — defendant in a real action — is specific to English common law before the abolition of real actions. American jurisdictions did not uniformly adopt real actions, and most states abolished them early in the nineteenth century through procedural reform. Researchers in American colonial records may encounter the term in its tenurial sense but are unlikely to find it in active procedural use.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: TENANT (for the modern and historical tenurial relationship); REAL ACTIONS (for the procedural framework in which tenaunt functioned as a term of art); FEUDAL TENURE (for the doctrinal background of the tenurial relationship).