Lords and Titles
| Author | Christopher Jessel |
| Pages | 381-390 |
Chapter 23
Lords and Titles
23.1 LORD
The expression ‘lord of the manor’ is used to describe the holder of a right of property in an incorporeal hereditament known as a lordship. A lord of a manor may also be a landlord, that is a person who grants a lease of land to another, usually called a tenant or lessee. The word ‘lord’ is also used in a different sense to describe a peer of the realm, a person who before the House of Lords Act 1999 was entitled to a writ of summons to advise the sovereign in Parliament.
This is in a sense a dignity, that is itself an incorporeal hereditament, in that, until the emergence of life peerages, it descended to the holder’s heir, but it is now no longer regarded as a property right.
The word ‘lord’ derives from Anglo-Saxon hlaford formerly hlaf-weard or loaf-ward, the keeper of loaves and therefore loaf-giver. The lord kept supplies of bread and gave them to his family and followers. Ultimately, the word may have a simple domestic origin. It was used as the translation of the Latin dominus. That also had a domestic origin from domus – a house. The dominus was master of the house, head of the family, owner of the slaves and farmer of the family land. Dominus was also the usual word for ‘sir’, for instance as used by soldiers to their officers in the army.
In the late Roman Empire it acquired new shades of meaning. The early emperors used various titles including princeps (see prince below) and imperator which initially meant general but from Domitian onwards to emphasise their power and majesty they called themselves dominus, lord of the Empire. This sense of dominus passed to the kingdoms that succeeded the empire and when the Carolingian Empire disintegrated in its turn and the powers of the emperor were, under the feudal system, taken over by the nobility,
1 Blackstone, Sir William, Commentaries on the Laws of England I.12.
382 The Law of the Manor
they too called themselves dominus. The feudal relationship, at every level from king and count at the top to knight and sergeant, was between lord and vassal, dominus and vassus or vassalus.
Meanwhile, it retained its old meaning of master or owner. The demesne, dominicum, is the land held directly by the lord which he can deal with as he wishes. His lordship over bondsmen was more like the ownership of a slave-master than the protection of a superior. However, as the word was used in various shades of meaning, it became possible by use of the word dominus for a serf subject to a master to become a tenant holding from one who was himself a tenant either of a greater lord or of the king.
23.2 HEREDITARY PEERS
In England the word ‘lord’ acquired the technical meaning of a person who had a hereditary right and duty to be summoned to advise the king in his council. After the formation of Parliament in the thirteenth century the greater landowners (along with the bishops and abbots who were celibate) came to be seen as the House of Lords in contrast to the representatives of the shires and boroughs who made up the House of Commons. For that purpose, the lords were distinct from other free inhabitants of the realm. At times special rules applied to lords; for example, they could be taxed more heavily because they were assumed to be wealthier, they were allowed to wear special clothes or types of material and, because they sat in Parliament in their own right, they could not vote in general elections. However, in general the English aristocracy have, as such, no special powers or duties. Some titles are hereditary; others, increasingly, are not. Lords are known as peers from the Latin par or equal since they were equal to one another before the king. There were formerly various types of lords in Parliament comprising earls, barons, dukes, marquesses and viscounts. There are also princes and life peers.
The word ‘earl’ is Saxon. In early Saxon times freemen were either eorls or ceorls. The eorls were aristocrats and having special privileges. The ceorls or churls were the common people. The greater eorls were ealdormen, powerful nobles governing shires or great regions, accountable only to the kings. In the tenth century, when the Danes under King Cnut ruled England, the king governed through officials called jarls. By around 1050 jarls and ealdormen had fused in earls. Earls were seen as the English counterpart of the Continental count, comte or Graf. These were officials whose origin goes back to the late Roman Empire and who had responsibility for large territories (22.2). William the Conqueror as Duke of Normandy had counts under him and did not want to introduce them into England, although some of his followers who were already
counts kept their titles. He gave his leading men the title of earl for their English holdings but as the French title was thought more polite an earl’s wife became known as countess. Most earls, even when they took their title from a shire (or county), did not control all of it and had scattered honours.
Both earls and the king granted fiefs to lesser lords called barons. The word ‘baron’ simply means man: until late in the Middle Ages the normal legal phrase for husband and wife was baron et feme. A baron came to mean a man who had done homage for a substantial fief. As discussed in 22.4 a barony or honour refers to a group of manors...
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