The act, process, or agreement of transferring one's allegiance from one lord to another, or from one property owner to another in a feudal system.
Formed from 'attorn' plus the suffix '-ment' (from Old French '-ment,' from Latin '-mentum'), which creates abstract nouns describing actions, results, or states. '-ment' became one of the most productive noun-forming suffixes in English.
Attornment is a beautiful example of how English took the Norman French legal vocabulary and instantly created abstract nouns with '-ment' suffixes—lawyers needed words for concepts, not just actions, so 'attornment' became the noun for the whole feudal concept.
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