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Lord of the Manor

Dignities were originally feudal lands, and introduced into England, together with the rest of that system, by the Normans. They were annexed to the possession of certain estates in land, and must have been created by a grant of those estates. Dignities were created in this manner in France and in Normandy. In Scotland the same practice prevailed. As all the ancient grants of lands made by the conqueror and his sons to their followers, are now lost, there exists no instance of the crown's erecting an estate into a barony or earldom; it is, however, admitted that such was the ancient practice. The dignities of baron and earl, with a right of sitting in parliament, continued to be annexed to the possession of some feudal seigneuries or lordships for a long time after the Conquest.

Upon the establishment of the Normans in England, the conqueror conferred the estates of the Saxon thanes upon his principal followers, as strict feuds, to be held immediately of himselfj by homage fealty, and military or other honorable services. The usual services reserved on these grants were the services of a certain number of knights ; and the persons who received them, in order to be able to perform their services, gave out by subinfeudation, portions of the lands to their followers, to be held of themselves by knight service ; reserving a tract of Perk, land round their castle, or mansion-house, for the maintenance of their own family; by which means their estates became feudal seigneuries, consisting of demesnes and services, and were called manors.

In almost all the charters of lands granted by the crown to abbies, a civil and criminal jurisdiction was expressly given. And we know that from time immemorial every lord of a manor has exercised a jurisdiction over his tenants; a franchise which must have been originally derived from the crown. The court in which the lord of a manor exercised his jurisdiction was called curia baronis, the court baron.

The process of subinfeudation went on rapidly; it was governed by rules of private law; it created new manors. Partition among coheiresses was another source of new manors; even in later centuries when legal doctrines had collected round the word ' manor,' and the general theory was that a manor must have existed from before the beginning of legal memory, it was still admitted that a partition among co-parceners might make two manors out of one.

Although every manor held immediately of the crown, was originally a barony, and the lord thereof a member of the atria regis, and the magnum consilium, yet when the barons where divided into majores and minores, it is probable that those only who possessed maneria capitalia, of which inferior manors were held, were considered as barones majores, and retained the dignity of barons; while those who had but a manerium non capitale, were called barones minores; and the crown having ceased to summon them by particular writs to parliament, in the reign of king John, or that of king Henry III, they lost the dignity and appellation of baron, and became mere lords of manors.

In old times, the Lords of Manors formed an upper class of the gentry of England; and although, when compared with their great number, but few of them had been summoned to Parliament, yet they were liable to be summoned. It was from among them that the barons were selected ; and on account of their obsolete privileges, they may, in some manner, claim a superiority over the other gentry, or untitled nobility. The lord of the manor might be a noble or knight or other substantial landholder, a monastery or bishopric or college, or it might be the king himself. Much of the land in each vill belonged directly to the lord of the manor. This land was called the demesne, and although scattered about in separate pieces in the open f1elds surrounding the village, was carried on as one large farm, the produce going directly to the lord of the manor. The cotters and villeins were bound to furnish an amount of labor which was generally sufficient to cultivate the demesne without cost to the lord of the manor.

The English manor derived its origin from a very early time; for it would appear that, since the enactment of certain statutes in the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th century, the process of subinfeudation, or granting land to be held in vassalage by knights service ceased. The lord of a manor was invested with high privileges. A court baron was inseparably incident to a manor, where the lord presides either in his own person or by his steward; and the jurisdiction of this Court extends over certain actions connected both with personal and real property.

The lord of the manor, though always a person of importance, yet occupied a varying position in the social scale. From the great magnate, who counted his manors by the score, and had a rent-roll equal to that of a modern nobleman, we pass through several gradations to the county gentleman, with his modest income of from £5 to £20 a year, that is, from £100 to £400 of our money. The lord's relation to his tenantry was that of a constitutional ruler to his subjects; the manor was a petty state, and custom, secured to the villain a sense of right, that gave dignity to the system.

In the thirteenth century the word 'manor,' like the modern term 'estate', was a vague, though common and useful word. Applied to a given instance it might be definite enough; no one would doubt that certain acres belonged to the manor of Dale, just as now-a-days it may be notorious throughout the countryside that certain acres are part of the Dale estate; but to have inquired what it was that gave the manor of Dale its unity, what made it one manor not two manors (to be called perhaps Upper Dale and Lower Dale), what were the characteristics a loss of which would have been fatal to its existence as a single manor, would have been to ask questions no clear answer to which could have been had, because they would seldom have been useful questions.

In the thirteenth century the terms 'manor' and 'vill' were not equivalent. The legal principles which shape the manor were not those which shape the vill. In a sense the vill is an unit of public, the manor an unit of private law; the one an unit for police purposes and fiscal purposes, the other a complex of proprietary rights and of the mutual obligations which bind lord to tenants and tenants to lord.

A Manor, in the original meaning of the term, consisted of lands upon which the lord had a mansion, and to which binds and mansion there belonged a seigniory over freeholders qualified in respect of quantity of estate, and sufficient, in point of number, to constitute a Court Baron, and these freeholders were called Vavassors. When we consider the importance of the station and privileges of Lords of Manors, and when we know that many families of the untitled English gentry have held that distinguished position from father to son, counting from the Norman conquest down to the present time, we cannot conceive how any doubt should ever have arisen as to the true nobility of the class to which they belong.

A typical English manor in its best known period, the 13th century, consisted partly of the houses of the inhabitants more or less closely clustered together, and surrounded by arable land divided into large fields, two or three in number. Each of these fields was divided again into shots or furlongs, and each of the shots was broken up into cultivated strips a pole wide, each containing an acre, separated by narrow balks of turf. There were also certain meadows for supplying hay; and beyond the cultivated land lay the wood and waste of the manor. Portions of arable or meadow land might be found apart from the organization of the remainder; the lord of the manor might have a park, and each householder a garden, but the land of the manor was the open fields, the meadows and the wastes or common. The condition of the inhabitants of such a manor is as complex as its geography.

At the head of the society came the lord of the manor, with his hall, court, or manor-house, an land immediately about it, and his demesne Tenants, both in the fields and in the meadow land. The manor-house was generally arranged for defence against robbers and thieves and was often surrounded by a moat with drawbridge, but was not provided with a keep or with towers or lofty curtain walls so as to stand a siege. The early buildings were comparatively small, square in plan, comprising a hall with one or two adjacent chambers; at a later period wings were added, thus forming three sides of a quadrangle.

The arable demesne consisted of certain of the acre strips lying scattered over the various furlongs; his meadow was a portion assigned to him each year by the custom of the manor. He had also rights over the surrounding waste paramount to those enjoyed by the other inhabitants. Part of his demesne land would be granted out to free tenants to hold at a rent or by military or other service; part would be in the lord's own hands, and cultivated by him. Each part so granted out will carry with it a share in the meadow land and in the profits of the waste. These rights of the free tenants over the waste limited the lord's power over it. He could not by enclosure diminish their interest in it. The statute of Merton in 1236 and the second statute of Westminster in 1285 marked the utmost limit of enclosure allowed in the 13th century. Below the lord and the free tenants came the villeins, natives, bondmen, or holders of virgate yard-lands, each holding a house, a fixed number of acre strips, a share of the meadow and of the profits of the waste.

Normally the holder of a virgate was unfree; he had no rights in the eye of the law against his lord, who was protected from all suits by the exceptio villenagii; he could not without leave quit the manor, and could be reclaimed by process of law if he did; the strict contention of law deprived him of all right to hold property; and in many cases he was subject to certain degrading incidents, such as merchel (merchetum), a payment due to the lord upon the marriage of a daughter, which was regarded as a special mark of unfree condition.

By the Tudor period equitable suits brought by tenants against their lords are not infrequent. Side by side with the alteration in the legal condition of the manor there went on an economic change. The labor rents and other services slowly disappeared, and were replaced by money payments. The field divisions gave way before inclosures, effected sometimes by the lords and sometimes by the tenants. Change in legal and agricultural practice went on side by side, and finally the manor ceased to be an important social form, and became only a peculiar form of land tenure and the abode of antiquarian curiosities.