The Picture of the Manor
| Author | Christopher Jessel |
| Pages | 1-13 |
PART I ROOTS
Chapter 1 The Picture of the Manor 3 Chapter 2 Time Out of Mind 15 Chapter 3 Decline of Years 29 Chapter 4 Custom and Variety 43
Chapter 1
The Picture of the Manor
1.1 THE MANOR AS AN IDEA AND A PLACE
There is no formal legal definition of a manor and it will be simplest to leave the issue of definition to the end of this work in 27.7, once the detailed aspects of a manor have been discussed. Historically, the manor has operated partly as a social structure with degrees of status, partly as a system of control of land and other resources and partly as a form of ownership. Its main feature was originally social, administrative and economic. Later it became a piece of property producing an income and other benefits such as sporting privileges. Now it has become a luxury item.
Traditional accounts regard manors as part of the feudal system. As explained in
22.1, the notion of a special feudal legal structure is not part of English law and it is best to regard the rules about manors as distinct from those relevant to the hierarchy of tenures such as knight service and baronies which make up a feudal structure. In view of the fact that many judges, particularly in recent years, have used the word ‘feudal’ in their reported decisions it will also be used in this book, but the reader must be prepared to treat it with caution as many historians now consider feudalism to be an illusory concept.
The meaning of manor and its place in society has changed over the centuries and has often been different when used by lawyers from its use by others. From early times a manor was seen as an area of land, although its original function was not so much the land as the organisation of the people who worked on it – the freeholders and the villeins or copyholders. With time the land became more important so that the boundaries needed to be defined on the ground. By the seventeenth century John Donne could famously say in his meditation often called For Whom the Bell Tolls:
1 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) No 17.
4 The Law of the Manor
The lawyers who over the centuries worked out and applied legal rules to the life and work of the manor did so by abstracting what they found in individual manors to a general standard or ideal. When a case came up for decision or when advice was wanted on a particular problem affecting individuals at a given date in a specific place the dispute or problem was resolved by the use of legal principles. Over the years these principles came to embody a typical or generalised manor. This hypothetical standard manor, which took shape around 1600 under the influence of Sir Edward Coke, did not correspond to any community that ever existed in any place or time.
Even so it was not dreamed up out of nothing. It was based on facts and institutions that had existed. As explained in 2.4 the traditional legal manor reached a classic form about a century after the Norman Conquest. Manors were very varied in structure but the typical manor so far as it existed and on which legal rules were based might have been found on the edge of the Midland plain on Sunday, 3 September 1189, the day on which Richard I was crowned.
This chapter therefore describes an imaginary standard manor of Middleton. Although it can be taken as a reference, it is indeed untypical. For simplicity the area of the manor corresponds to the ecclesiastical parish and both to the physical settlement, with one village without any dependent hamlets. There is a lord who lives in the manor house and a number of peasant farmers and dependent labourers and their families. The description includes the physical layout, beginning with the arable land, and then the village, and finally the woods and pastures. Then it considers the way the community worked – the basis of the agricultural economy – and finally the size of the units of area and the scale of activities.
1.2 FARMLAND
The village lies in the middle of the manor surrounded by the lands on which crops are grown. These are of two kinds.
2 Richard’s father Henry II died on 6 July, but at the time a king’s reign was not treated as beginning until the coronation
3 Bennett, HS, Life on the English Manor 1150–1400 (Alan Sutton Publishing, 1937).
4 Taylor, C, Fields in the Landscape (Alan Sutton Publishing, 1987) ch 4 on this section generally.
hedge. In the Middle Ages such land was known as a close, from the Latin word clausum, meaning enclosed. If the land was also used for grazing the boundary was to keep beasts in it from escaping. When crops were grown the boundary was to keep out animals that might eat them.
In 1189 a field meant something different from that. It referred to the other type of cultivated land known as the field, or open field. It was very large, perhaps 200 acres. It was a vast expanse with no fences, hedges or trees. At first sight it comprised a mass of identical crops but closer examination shows more detail. A typical village in 1189 had three open fields, although there could be two or four. The great field was itself divided into smaller areas called furlongs and the furlong into yet smaller ones known as strips. The strips were, as the name suggests, long and narrow, perhaps 10 yards wide or a little more, and anything up to half a mile long. In theory they contained an area of an acre, although there is some suggestion that many were early divided (lengthways) into quarter...
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