Manorialism

“ There are, therefore, many reasons for maintaining the permanence in Britain of the villa organisation; and we have seen above that while there are no clear traces of the free community, there are traces of what is afterwards called the manor, within a couple of centuries after the English conquest. These two lines of argument converge toward the conclusion that [Pg xxxi] the manorial system dates in the main from the period of Roman rule. ”

“ I think that many features in the constitution of the thirteenth century manor show its gradual growth and comparatively recent origin. The so-called manorial system consists, in truth, in the peculiar connexion between two agrarian bodies, the settlement of villagers cultivating their own fields, and the home-estate of the lord tacked on to this settlement and dependent on the work supplied by it. I take only the agrarian side, of course, and do not mention the political protection which stands more or less as an equivalent for the profits received by the lord from the peasantry. ”

“ The commoners on a manorial common then will be, prima facie, the freeholders and copyholders of the manor, and the persons who own lands which were copyhold of the manor but have been enfranchised.
The occupants of lands belonging to the lord of the manor, though they usually turn out their cattle on the common, do so by virtue of the lord’s ownership of the soil of the common, and can, as a rule, make no claim to any right of common as against the lord, even though the practice of turning out may have obtained in respect of particular lands for a long series of years. ”

“ The manor—in embryo—was, in fact, already in course of development. The German economic system was, to say the very least, working itself out on lines so nearly parallel to those of the Roman manorial system that we cannot wonder at the silent ease with which before and after the conquest of Roman provinces, German chieftains became lords of villas and manors. The two systems, Roman and German, may well have easily combined in producing the later manorial system which grew up in the Roman provinces of Gaul and the two Germanies. ”

“ We find as an important manorial arrangement the custom to 'apportion' the rights of common to the tenements, that is to decide in the manorial Court, mostly according to verdicts of juries, how many head of cattle, and of what particular kind, may be sent to the divers pasture-grounds of the village by the several holdings. ”

“ On the other hand, it is much too small a tenement for any one who is going to play the part of a manorial lord, unless we use the term manorial in so wide a sense that it becomes useless. For how many tenants will this manorial lord, who is to be taken as the typical householder, have upon his 120 acres? If his arrangements are at all like those revealed to us by Domesday Book, he will keep at least one-third of his land in demesne, and there will remain but 80 acres for the coloni. ”

“ Large numbers of the Havering virgaters in 1307 were occupying quite small holdings, while the purprestures, or encroachments on the waste, were becoming formidable. These considerations suggest that early manorial history can best be studied by investigations into the extent of enclosure in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and that concentration on the unprogressive nucleus of the manor, on villeinage and customary tenure, may well blind the student to the greater economic significance of the developments outside the common fields. ”

“ And it is evident that the custom of the manor, at any rate in our period, is a safeguard of the tenants' interests rather than of those of the manorial authorities. It is not only that the changes which followed the Great Plague have set the peasants free from the most irksome customary restrictions, but, further, that, in the sixteenth century, it is the lord who wants to make innovations and the tenants who resist them, and that it is therefore the latter who stand to gain most by clinging to custom. ”

“ If we consider the way in which the landed property of the kingdom was resettled after the Conquest, each great tenant of the Crown subdividing his vast estates among the lesser lords who had fought under his banner, we shall see the likelihood that each of these new lords of manors, as soon as the country had settled down in tranquillity, would set himself to make the best of his new acquisitions; to add to their value by breaking up new waste land; to consult his dignity and comfort by improving upon the rude old hall of his Saxon predecessor, or building himself a new manor house. ”

“ The fact that in exceptional cases family holdings were able to maintain their own under manorial management must not be allowed to lead us to underrate the power of the manorial element. There were in tribal custom itself as described by Tacitus elements of what we have elsewhere spoken of as the embryo manor, but this must not blind our eyes to the fact that something more was required to produce the general uniformity of holdings and single succession upon manorial estates than tribal custom working alone. ”

“ Clearly in these circumstances a rigid classification of holdings by the manorial authorities is quite compatible with a great deal of diversity in the arrangements made with each other by the holders, and we are likely to miss a good many innovations if we look at the manor only through the eyes of officials and as a revenue-producing concern. ”

“ Manors, they used to say, arose in this fashion. A great lord obtained a piece of land from the King; part he disposed of to tenants who held of him in freehold (this [Pg 37] sub-infeudation was stopped by the statute quia emptores in 1290) ; the rest was his domain, on part of which he built the manor house, another part was cultivated by villeins, then the cotters had dwellings with portions of land, and the residue was waste, where the folk of the manor pastured their cattle, gathered fuel, and made their ways. ”

“ Such an arrangement exists in every place; it is regulated by custom and by the decisions of the manorial court or halimote, it extends equally over the free and over the unfree land, over the waste, the moor and wood, and over269 the fallow; it admits a certain number and certain kinds of beasts, and excludes others. Only because such a general arrangement is supposed to exist, is the right to common treated in so vague a manner; the documents present, in truth, only a reference to relations which are substantiated in the husbandry system of the manor. ”

“ Two elements are necessary to constitute the manorial arrangement, the peasant village and the home farm worked by its help.
If we turn now to the evidence of the feudal period, we shall see that the labour-service relation, although very marked and prevalent in most cases, is by no means the only one that should be taken into account. In a large number of cases the relation between lord and peasants resolves itself into money payments, and this is only another way of saying that the manorial group disaggregates itself. ”

“ The manorial authorities have often, it is clear, been for a long time consolidating the demesne by exchange and purchase, so as to avoid the wastefulness of having land scattered in a hundred separate pieces, and the only obstacle to its complete unification consists of strips and patches which are held by tenants who are for one reason or another unwilling to sell, small spits and islands which stand out of the surrounding sea. ”

“ In fact, the history of enclosures is part of the history of the great revolution in agriculture by which the manorial system was converted into the modern system as we know it to-day of several ownership and the triumvirate of landlord, tenant farmer, and labourer. No one could have objected to the enclosure of waste; it was that of the common arable fields and of the common pasture that excited the indignation of contemporaries. They saw many of the small holders displaced and the countryside depopulated ”

“ The title by which land is held according to manorial custom is derived from communal authority quite as much as from the lord's grant. Without stepping out of the feudal evidence into historical inquiry, we find that civil arrangements of the peasantry are based on acts performed through the agency of the steward, and before the manorial court, which has a voice in the matter and vouches for its validity and remembrance. ”

“ Sometimes land is granted to strangers because none of the kindred of the deceased will take it. Often a manor court limited a fee in land to certain issue instead of being inheritable by all heirs. Surveyors' poles marked boundaries declared by court in boundary disputes. This resulted in survey maps showing villages and cow pastures.
The revival of trade and the appearance of a money economy was undermining the long-established relationship between the lord of the manor and his villeins. ”

“ You must remember, too, that there were several different kinds of land-owners or overlords—the king, the great lords, bishops, colleges, and monasteries. The manors, of which these estates were made up, in the course of centuries were divided and subdivided in many ways as the land became more valuable. Many people might thus have an interest in one manor which a couple of hundred years before had been in the hands of one person only. ”

“ The conditions offered to subsequent adventurers were, naturally, less favorable. All these grants were of fee-simple estates of inheritance, and the colonists received in addition grants of small lots in the town of St. Mary’s. Each tract of a thousand acres or more was erected into a manor, with the right to hold courts [529] baron and leet, and the other privileges belonging to manors in England. A large number of manors were laid off in the Province, and in some instances courts baron and leet were held. ”

“ Having noticed the evident tendencies of the fiscal district of the later empire to approach the manorial type, and to become a crown villa or manor with dependent holdings upon it, we must pass on to a further important effect of the oppression of the imperial officers. ”

“ Nobles and their retinue moved from manor to manor, as they had for centuries, to keep watch upon their lands and to consume the produce thereof; it was easier to bring the household to the estate than to transport the yield of the estate to the household. Also, at regular intervals sewage had to be removed from the cellar pits. Often a footman walked or ran on foot next to his master or mistress when they rode out on horseback or in a carriage. ”

“ These great manorial lords also undertake to develop to the utmost of their power the natural resources of their vast domains. "When this system was originally introduced the crown lands were conceded for three generations, and the order of succession was to be through the female line, on the condition that the women married Europeans. ”

“ The local monarchy of the manorial lords was fast giving way to a central power which maintained its laws, the circuits of its judges, the fiscal claims of its exchequer, the police interference of its civil officers all through the country, and, by prevailing over the franchises of manorial lords, gave shape to a vast dominion of legal equality and legal protection, in which the forces of commercial exchange, of contract, of social intercourse, found a ready and welcome sphere of action. ”

“ The feudal system was built upon predatory tribal warfare, where possession was determined by might to have and to hold. In the mediaeval period the manorial system of landholding developed, whereby the lord and his retainers claimed the land by their right of occupation and the power to hold, whether this came through conquest, force of arms, or agreement. ”

“ The lands of the manorial estate cultivated by the lord directly by forced labor were yielding far more alluring returns. 110 Hence, it came about that whenever a peasant left his lot, the lord of the manor, instead of settling it by leasing it out to another peasant family, simply annexed it to his seigniorial reserve and cultivated it by forced labor. ”

“ The traces of a manorial economy that have been discovered in yet remoter times are few, slight and dubious. A passage in the laws of Ine [1141] seems to prove that there were men who had let out small quantities of land, ‘a yard or more,’ to cultivators at rents and who were wrongfully endeavouring to get from their lessees work as well as gafol. The same law may prove the highly probable proposition that some men had taken ‘loans’ of manses and were paying for them, not only by gafol, but by work done on the lord’s land. ”

“ When Wales (or such part of it as had not been before conquered and made manorial) was conquered by Edward I. the chieftainship did not fall into the hands of manorial lords, but was vested directly in the Prince of Wales.310
The tribesmen.
The tribesmen are men of the tribal blood, i.e. of equal blood with the chief. They, therefore, do not at all resemble serfs. They are more like manorial lords of lordships split up and divided by inheritance, than serfs. They are not truly allodial holders, for they hold tribal land; but they have no manorial lord over them. ”

“ In the Domesday survey and in the Rectitudines we find England divided into estates or manors, and the manors consisting of demesne land and land occupied mainly by villani holding virgates or yardlands. The boundaries of the territory of a manor are easily and generally given in the Saxon charters, but the yardlands cannot be described by boundaries because they are bundles of strips scattered over the common lands of the manor. ”