Manders

“ It’s out of date, now, even in the mountains. The Manders family is the last to carry on, I understand. He’s got a head on him, that boy; he’ll learn—learn fast!”
She had never seen him so alertly interested. It became an obsession with him in the weeks which followed; they took toilsome trips far out of their way to find Luke Manders, and they made little progress [30] in confidence or friendship, but this merely added a fillip to their determination. It became a sort of golden legend with them, gilding their dull days. “Well, Glen, I saw him!”
“Oh, did you, Dad?” ”

“ Manders tramped up to the next landing as the door of the sick-room took him in.
For five minutes the stairs were darker than ever. Then the assistant, a very young man, came out again, followed by the old woman with a candle. Mrs. Manders listened in the upper dark. "He's sinking fast," said the assistant. "He must have a stimulant. Dr. Mansell ordered port wine. Where is it?" Mrs. Curtis mumbled dolorously. "I tell you he must have it," he averred with unprofessional emphasis (his qualification was only a month old) . "The man can't take solid food, and his strength must be kept up somehow. ”

“ Manders's knock, in the full morning; and soon the two women came out on the landing together, Mrs. Curtis with a shapeless clump of bonnet. "Ah, 'e's a lovely corpse," said Mrs. Manders. "Like wax. So was my 'usband."
"I must be stirrin'," croaked the old woman, "an' go about the insurance an' the measurin' an' that. There's lots to do."
"Ah, there is. 'Oo are you goin' to 'ave,—Wilkins? I 'ad Wilkins. Better than Kedge, I think: Kedge's mutes dresses rusty, an' their trousis is frayed. ”

“ Luke Manders knew little of means or methods or rules, but he arrived at correct conclusions with a speed and accuracy which stopped barely short of magic.
“You keep on like this,” the man blinked and chuckled, “and I’ll have you keeping my books for me, before you can say ‘Jack Robinson!’” He sobered. “Now listen here, Luke. What you want is business college. ”

“ But now hit purely stands to reason I must leave him, hit’s ontelling when, and I do shorely hone to have him fotched on, for he is one young-un with a headpiece!”
[22] Good roads and schooling would come too late for Ailsa Manders, but she had glimpsed the vision for lack of which her people were perishing. The doctor knew the Manders; a hard and reckless lot; killers. The old woman had the look of a ruthless tribal priestess. She caught sight of Glen and beckoned to her to come nearer. ”

“ Luke Manders agrees with her entirely, and Southern Europe contributes some of its culls to the mill, notably one Black Orlo, whose vitriolic utterances the doctor’s daughter finds nourishing. WITH a sag of excitement, a sense of anti-climax, Glen found that Luke was not in his office: he would not return to the mill until late afternoon. This was not surprising, because old Ben Birdsall was shunting more and more of his own responsibilities upon his young assistant, and Luke Manders was doing much work which was far outside the borders of a bookkeeper’s position. ”

“ The small maneria.
We hear the objection that, be it never so humble, a manor is a manor. But is that truism quite true? If all that we want for the constitution of a manor is a proprietor of some land who has a right to exact from some other man, or two or three other men, the whole or some part of the labour that is necessary for the tillage of his soil, we may indeed see manors everywhere and at all times. ”

“ Still wearing his cocked hat—for he had nothing else with which to shield his head from the sun—and with his uniform coat on, for he had not yet an opportunity of ripping from it the letter he carried, and this he would not part from—Dickory roamed about the little settlement. Mander was an industrious and thrifty man. ”

“ You will say, my military career in India, when I followed my regiment there, should have given me some satisfaction and so it assuredly has. You will remind me also, that if I disappointed the hopes of my guardians, I did not incur their displeasure—that the bishop, at his death, bequeathed me his blessing, his manuscript sermons, and a curious portfolio, containing the heads of eminent divines of the church of England; and that my uncle, Sir Paul Mannering, left me sole heir and executor to his large fortune. ”

“ As a lordship based on land tenure, the manor necessarily comprises a ruler and a population dependent on him, and the characteristic trait of such dependence consists not in ownership extending over persons, as in slave-holding communities, nor in contractual arrangements, as in a modern economic organization, but in various forms and degrees of subjection, chiefly regulated by custom. In the sense mentioned the manor is by no means a peculiarly English institution; it occurs in every country where feudalism got a hold. ”

“ We may once and for all dismiss as a dream any theory which would teach us that from the first the main and normal constitutive cell in the social structure of the English people has been the manor. To call the ceorl’s tenement of 120 acres a manor, though it may have a few slaves to till it, would be a grotesque misuse of words, nor, if there is to be clear thinking, shall we call it an embryo manor, for by no gradual process can a manor be developed from it. There must be a coagulation of some three or four such tenements into a single proprietary unit before that name can be fairly earned. ”

“ If the lord was not living in the manor-house there was someone there to represent him, and to look after his interests. In scores of manors the [Pg 67] people never set eyes on their overlord; but they felt the grip of his power through the steward of the manor. Now, though the steward could not go against the customs of the manor openly, there were many ways in which he could make himself very disagreeable to the people under his care. He was there to grind what he could out of the tenants for the lord, and he took care to grind for himself too. ”

“ 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 Rights of Lord and Tenants. ”

“ Some manors are free of geld, and therefore to make our definition correct we ought to say that a manor is a tenement which either pays its geld at a single place or which would do so were it not freed from the tax by some special privilege. A manerium does not cease to be a manerium by being freed from geld. (2) In later days we may well find a manor holden of another manor, so that a plot of land may be within two manors. If this usage of the term can be traced back into Domesday Book as a common phenomenon, then our doctrine is in great jeopardy. ”

“ The Mandan belief in a future state is connected with the tradition of their origin: The whole nation resided in one large village under ground, near a subterraneous lake. Some of the people climbed up to this earth by means of a grape-vine, which broke when a corpulent woman essayed to climb it. Therefore the rest of the people remained in the subterranean village. When the Mandan die they expect to return to the original seats of their forefathers, the good reaching the ancient village by means of the lake, which the burden of the sins of the wicked will not enable them to cross. ”

“ If we look in the world of sense for the essence of the manerium we shall find nothing that is common to all maneria save a piece of ground—very large it may be, or very small—held (in some sense or another) by a single person or by a group of co-tenants, for even upon a house we shall not be able to insist very strictly. After weary arithmetical labours we might indeed obtain an average manor; we might come to the conclusion that the average manor contained so many hides or acres, possibly that it included land occupied by so many sokemen, villeins, bordiers, serfs ”

“ The existence of a manor implies a lord of the manor, who exercised authority over all the villagers, owned the home farm, and had certain rights over the rest of the land. How all this came about, we scarcely know. Owing to the Danish invasions, when the rude barbarous warriors carried fire and sword into many a peaceful town and village, the villagers found themselves at the mercy of these savage hordes. Probably they sought the protection of some thane, or eorl, with his band of warriors, who could save their lands from pillage. ”

“ A genuine specimen of feudal observances is preserved in the custom of riding the boundaries of manors, which, in the mountain district, where the line of division is not very distinct, is performed perhaps once during each generation, by the representatives of the lord of the manor, accompanied by an immense straggling procession of all ages,—the old men being made useful in pointing out important or disputed portions of the boundary, and the young in having it impressed on their memories, so that their evidence or recollection may be made available in future peregrinations. ”

“ He treats his peasant like a despot, dispenses justice, extorts his manorial rights, exacts his thirteenth with rigour.... He is exempt from taxes. But his old manor has neither turret nor dovecot (the outward signs of noblesse) , and he can boast neither of fiefs nor vassals. Still, he is none the less a noble. Madame is never seen without her Fontange (a lace head-dress) , though she be busy with her housekeeping—nay, though we find her in the stable, milking the cows. There is no woman-servant at the manor-house; an odd-lad-about cooks and gardens, serves at table and rubs down the horse. ”

“ This is the right road, and you will soon reach the army; or rather let me conduct you to it myself.' 'Not for the world, my dear fellow,' replied Manning; 'your direction is plain and I can follow it. I will never-consent that a faithful subject of his Majesty should be subjected to the dangers of captivity or death on my account. If we should fall in with a party of rebels, and we cannot say they are not in the neighbourhood now, we should both lose our lives. I should be hanged for desertion, and you for aiding me to reach the British army.' This speech produced the effect he desired. ”

“ But Nature's bounties are unaltered. The sun will shine as fair on these ruins, whether the property of a stranger, or of a sordid and obscure trickster of the abused law, as when the banners of the founder first waved upon their battlements."
These reflections brought Mannering to the door of the house, which was that day open to all. He entered among others who traversed the apartments, some to select articles for purchase, others to gratify their curiosity. ”

“ The Mandans (people of the pheasants) were the first people created in the world, and they originally lived inside of the earth; they raised many179 vines, and one of them had grown up through a hole in the earth, over head, and one of their young men climbed up it until he came out on the top of the ground, on the bank of the river, where the Mandan village stands. He looked around, and admired the beautiful country and prairies about him—saw many buffaloes—killed one with his bow and arrows, and found that its meat was good to eat. ”

“ We see swarms of men who are free men but who are subject, they and their land, to various modes and degrees of seignorial power. The modes are many, the degrees are gentle. Personal, tenurial, justiciary threads are woven into a web that bewilders us. Here we see the work of commendation, there the work of the land-loan, and there again what comes of grants of sake and soke. We see the formation of manors taking place under our eyes, and as yet the process is by no means perfect. In village after village there is nothing that our economic historians would consent to call a manor. ”

“ Lord Charles Manners, ninth son of John, second Duke of Rutland, was many years an officer in the Third Regiment of Foot Guards, in which corps he was promoted to the rank of captain and lieutenant-colonel, on the 27th of May, 1745. On the breaking out of the seven years’ war, he was commissioned to raise, form, and discipline a regiment of foot, now the Fifty-sixth, of which he was appointed colonel in December, 1755. In 1759 he was promoted to the rank of major-general. ”

“ Upon the Thursday appointed, Mr Pleydell made his appearance at the inn where Colonel Mannering lodged. The venison proved in high order, the claret excellent, and the learned counsel, a professed amateur in the affairs of the table, did distinguished honour to both. I am uncertain, however, if even the good cheer gave him more satisfaction than the presence of Dominie Sampson, from whom, in his own juridical style of wit, he contrived to extract great amusement, both for himself and one or two friends whom the Colonel regaled on the same occasion. ”

“ The list of his engravings in 1510, when, according to van Mander, he was only sixteen, includes subjects as various as a celebrated “Ecce Homo,” “Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise,” a herdsman and a milkmaid with three cows, and a little naked girl running away from a barking dog. ”