Other forms: chattels
A chattel is a movable possession, as opposed to land. Goods and chattels, personal chattels, a chattel mortgage.
It is a legal term and the division it draws is ancient: land is real property and everything else is a chattel. Chattel slavery is the phrase for owning people as property, and it is the harshest use the word has.
1nounchattelA movable possession, as opposed to land.
“The will left the land to his son and his chattels, like furniture and jewels, to his daughter.”
chattel is a possession.
It is the same word as cattle, and for the same reason: what a man owned that could get up and walk away.
hooks ontocattle
Medieval Latin capitale means property, from caput, a head; capital and cattle are doublets.
Proto-Indo-European
*kap-
Latin
capitālis — of the head
Medieval Latin
capitāle
Old French
chatel
Middle English
chatel
English, today
chattel
Built from
From Middle English chatel, from Old French chatel, from Medieval Latin capitāle (English a doublet of capital), from Latin capitālis (“of the head”), from caput (“head”) + -alis (“-al”). Compare the doublet a doublet of cattle, which is from an Anglo-Norman variant. Compare also capital and kith and kine (“all one’s possessions”), which also use “cow” to mean “property”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA