What is a Manor?
| Author | Christopher Jessel |
| Pages | 445-461 |
Chapter 27
What is a Manor?
27.1 JURISPRUDENCE OF THE MANOR
This chapter aims at a jurisprudential assessment of the legal nature of the manor. This is particularly concerned with the essence of a manor. What really makes it? To answer that question it is necessary to look at the underlying ideas, to see how they have been applied in the past, and to attempt a definition. There are broadly three approaches to the manor. One is to see it as a community and a form of local economic organisation. The second is to regard it as a unit of custom, an area where local law modifies the common law of the realm. The third is to consider it as a piece of property, as a bundle of rights of the lord and of obligations on him.
Despite the historical detail of some chapters, this book has described what the manor is in the twenty-first century, but that carries with it what it was, or at least what it was thought to be. Manors developed 1000 years ago. In some sense the manor transferred by a conveyance drafted by a solicitor today is identical to the manor of the same name described in Domesday Book. There is continuity. A historian may discover the names of a succession of lords since 1066, and that what was handed on from one generation to the next has hardly changed. What will be referred to below as the substance may not have changed. But the appearance, the function and what will be described as the accidents of the manor have changed a great deal. The manor of 1086 was not the same as that of 1290, 1348, 1600, 1845, 1925 or today.
Until the Black Death the manor was primarily a means of organising farmers and farm production for the support of lords and for local co-operation among farmers. Its other functions were incidental. Although practice and the terms of occupation varied a great deal over time and across the country the impression is of the manor as a means for lords, whether individuals or institutions such as abbeys or the Crown, to control farmers and labourers, partly to provide an income and partly to govern the countryside. After 1348 conditions changed
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with the gradual disappearance of serfdom and the shift to a more commercial outlook, but the old ways of thinking about and understanding manors remained until about 1600.
Modern ideas of manors derive largely from Sir Edward Coke.
Coke was born in 1552 and died in 1634. He lived at a time when villeinage disappeared. He was a contemporary and rival of Francis Bacon and his life overlapped those of Shakespeare and Hobbes. His writings had a great influence on the development of English (and American) liberties and therefore on democracy. His mind was trained in learning and ideas derived from what we call the Middle Ages: to him these were simply the years before his time and the concepts he used were those familiar to preceding generations of lawyers. However, at this time new ideas were replacing those which had prevailed for centuries. Coke thought and wrote in a traditional way but he was practical lawyer in the forefront of new developments and his ideas about the manor were such as to suit the world of his time. His work provided the basis for all later decisions and discussion. Therefore, although the manor may be seen historically as a mediaeval institution, the legal analysis depends on the work of Coke and for most purposes can disregard what has gone before. There are three relevant aspects of Coke’s thought: his philosophy, his politics and his history, all of which have affected the idea of the manor.
27.2 COKE’S PHILOSOPHY
Coke begins his discussion with a brief historical account. He speculates as to whether the Saxons knew the idea of a manor and does not reach a conclusion, but he then refers
1 For an account of Coke’s life, see Bowen, CD, The Lion and the Throne. The Life and Times of
Sir Edward Coke (Little Brown & Co, 1985). For the general philosophical background, see Copenhaver, BP and Schmitt, CB, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1992). For his political/legal approach, see Burgess, G, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992).
2 Bowen op cit 527.
3 Coke, Sir Edward, Complete Copyholder (1630) ss 10, 11.
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the Normans, from whom we had the very form of Manors which is observed amongst us at this present hour. I confess, indeed, that sithence the original Creation of manors, Time hath brought in some Innovations and Alterations, as in giving a large Freedom until Copy-holders both in the nature of their Service, and in the manner of their Tenure. Yet I may boldly say, that the self-same form of Manors remains unaltered in substance, though something altered in circumstance.
He discusses at length the services owed by tenants of the manor and it is evident that what he describes is a shift from the original concept of cultivators owing duties to the lord to a newer one under which they hold their lands, whether freehold or copyhold, as property subject to conditions but otherwise at their disposal. Correspondingly, the right of the lord is one of property, and ownership of rights, rather than a position of superiority and control. Lord and tenant alike have rights and duties. As he says:
No marvel then that many able men turn Copy-holders, and many Peasants turn Free-holders: no marvell, I say, that men of all sorts and conditions, promiscuously, turn both Free-holders and Copy-holders, sithence there is such small respect had unto the quality of the Land in the reservation of our Services.
Nevertheless, he was imbued with the ideas of his time, which emphasised the concept of status or, as it was then put, degree. Degree, the relationship of superior to inferior, was understood to run through all creation from God to the lowliest worm and among humans from the king or queen to the humble farm worker. The manor was seen as a part of that structure, headed by the lord, and within which copyholders and freeholders had their place.
Degree was only part of the analysis. Coke needed to examine two other concepts, expressed in the terms of traditional thought. The first is the concept of substance which derives from the philosophy of Aristotle
4 Ibid s 7.
5 Aristotle, Metaphysics (c 330 BC) Z.28a.
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In the case of tables this is not much practical use. A prospective buyer who goes into a shop does not want to buy tableness, but something of the right size, shape and material on which to put food. In the case of legal concepts, by contrast, it is important. This sort of analysis enabled lawyers and civil servants to associate an enormous variety of different units of every shape and size that operated across the country by analysing the underlying idea and establishing general rules which could be applied to what appeared to be different circumstances. Even though each manor was different, with its own customs and peculiarities, they were subject to general laws, they could be dealt with as property and there could be rules about courts and legal proceedings. Classifying something as a manor enabled people to deal with it as an idea. Of course this existed before the twelfth century. Domesday Book regards almost every piece of land in the country as being within a manor even though they vary in size, population, equipment and revenue. Aristotelian philosophy sharpened notions of law and government considerably. To some extent these ideas also came from the rediscovery of Roman law in the thirteenth century; which in turn had been affected by philosophical ideas current during the late empire.
Coke does not directly discuss the substance of the manor, but the concept of accidents occurs in his discussion of services (s 22). He first distinguishes between services of profit and others:
Services of Profits are of two sorts. 1. Tending to the publick Profit of the Commonweal; as when the Lord injoyneth his Tenant to amend High-ways, to repair decayed Bridges, or similia. 2. Tending to the private Profit of the Lord; as where the Tenant is injoyned to be the Lord’s Carver, Butler, or Brewer, or is tied to pale the Lord’s Parks, to tile the Lord’s Houses, to thatch the Lord’s Barns, and similia. And thus much for Corporal Services.
In treating of other services he distinguishes annual services from those which are accidental:
Annual services are in number infinite, in nature all one, for they tend to the increase of the Lord’s Coffers, and are...
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