Menagerie

“ That's what a menagerie is—it's a place where they have all the kinds of animals and things in the world, for show, and a good many birds, and maybe turtles, too, but they don't have any fine clear pond. They have just a big tent, like the one Mr. Crow saw, and a lot of cages inside. They keep most of the animals in cages, and they ought to keep them all there, and I don't think they feed them [36] very much, nor the best things, or they wouldn't look so fierce and hungry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Any one may judge for himself that such a store could not last long; and as all my parishioners felt an ardent longing after spiritual food, and as I and the churchwardens could only get together about sixteen farthings in the whole parish, which was not enough to buy bread and wine, the thought struck me once more to inform my lord the sheriff of our need. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the villeins were not without their own officer, the provost or reeve. His duty was to arrange the distribution of the services due from the tenants, and, as their representative, to assist the bailiff in the management of the manor. Sometimes the same man appears to have united both offices, and we find the reeve accounting to the lord for the issues of the manor. ”

“ Render therefore her horse to this forlorn woman; for it is robbery to seize or detain other men’s goods, since the horse was not thine before [the man’s death] ” [300] .
[Pg 109] (3) Issues of the manor. Before passing on to sources of income of a more specifically ecclesiastical character, some account must be given of the third great class of receipts which came to a convent in its capacity of landowner, to wit the “issues of the manor.” Attached to almost every nunnery was its home farm, which provided the nuns with the greater part of their food [301] . ”

“ Howbeit, when my dear gossip, who stood behind her, saw that her little hands, and more especially her nails, had turned black and blue, he spoke for her to the worshipful court, whereupon the abominable Sheriff only said, "Oh, let her be; let her feel what it is to fall off from the living God." But Dom. Consul was more merciful, inasmuch as, after feeling the cords, he bade the constable bind her hands less cruelly and slacken the rope a little, which accordingly he was forced to do. ”

“ And when they had become somewhat more quiet, Dom. Consul left the corpse of the sheriff in charge with the miller, until such time as, by God's help, he should return. Item, he caused the grey charger to be tied up to the oak-tree till the same time, seeing that the miller swore that he had no room in the mill, inasmuch as his stable was filled with straw; but that he would give the grey horse some hay, and keep good watch over him. And now were we wretched creatures forced to get into the cart again, after that the unsearchable will of God had once more dashed all our hopes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had rather win you to fulfil your duties freely, and of a willing mind, than obtain the most exact obedience to legal orders and directions; and I would, therefore, again remind you that there is a contradiction between the man and the office, when any one discharges the duties of Churchwarden with a narrow, grudging, and penurious heart. If we can bear to see our Parish Church damp, slovenly, decaying, or patched up with cheap, paltry repairs; if we can endure to argue and object, and put off our duty from year to year, or to try and throw on others what we ought to do ourselves ”

“ Their duty is to see that all butchers, fishmongers, poulterers, bakers, and other sellers of victuals, do not sell or expose to sale within this Manor any unwholesome, corrupt, or contagious flesh, fish, or other victuals; and in case any such be exposed to sale, we find that the said Officers, by the ancient custom of the Manor may seize, burn, or destroy the same, or otherwise present the offenders at the next Court Leet to be holden for this Manor. ”

“ As most manors belonged to lords who had many manors in their possession, the steward or other official commonly proceeded from one manor or group of manors to another, holding the courts in each. Before the close of the thirteenth century the records of the manor courts, or at least of the more important of them, began to be kept with very great regularity and fulness, and it is to the mass of these manor court rolls which still remain that we owe most of our detailed knowledge of the condition of the body of the people in the later Middle Ages. ”

“ So modern in tone is his section on the management of servants, both in his account of their ways and in his advice upon dealing with them, that one often rubs one's eyes to be sure that what one is reading is really a book written over five centuries ago by an old burgess of Paris. The Ménagier evidently had a fairly large household, and he probably owned a country as well as a town house, for he speaks several times of overseeing the farm-hands 'when you are in the village'. ”

“ Colonies of zebra-clad prisoners tenant the wards, and thread the intricate passages leading through tiers and radiating wings of cells, so cunningly arranged that, amid all the appearance of congregations, separation and solitude is ensured, even upon the giant wheel itself, and still further, even in the place for worship, where boardings, shelvings, and all manner of strangely devised contrivances, prevent communion between the several classes of the unfortunate, that suspected and condemned may not mingle, the felony and the misdemeanour may not be in juxtaposition ”

“ 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 ”

“ It does not signify how apparently dull, how unappropriate to fixed habits, how unvarying the inanimate scene, how much the inmates may be visited by low fevers, agues, rheumatisms, and pulmonary affections; the manor-house, or the ancient monastery, which has for ages been the residence of nobility, becomes, in consequence, the meed of wealth, and the goal of vulgar hope, to be patiently endured, however little it may be enjoyed! Pride will feed upon the possession ”

“ The cellarer.—The cellarer of the monastery, chosen from among the congregation, should be wise, sedate, and sober; he should not be gluttonous, proud, quarrelsome, spiteful, indolent, nor wasteful; he should fear God, since he acts in a way as the father of the monastery. He should be careful of everything, doing nothing except by the order of the abbot, and observing all the commands laid upon him. He should not rebuke the brothers roughly; if any brother is unreasonable in his demands, he should yet treat him reasonably, mildly refusing his request as being improper. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There, sir, I have told you the whole story of the events which led up to the murder of Lord Mannering by his wife upon the night of September the 14th, in the year 1894. Perhaps you will put my statement on one side as the constable did at Mannering Towers, or the judge afterwards at the county assizes. Or perhaps you will see that there is the ring of truth in what I say, and you will follow it up, and so make your name for ever as a man who does not grudge personal trouble where justice is to be done. ”

“ Also it happens from time to time that the people of one manor have to perform some services in another, for instance, because they use pasture in that other manor [616] . Such 'forinsec' labour may be due even from tenants of a strange lord. By the side of purely agricultural duties we find such as are required by the political or judicial organisation of the manor. Peasants are bound to guard and hang thieves, to carry summonses and orders, to serve at the courts of the superior lord and of the king [617] . ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Compelled by law to live on the manor on which they were born and to give a great part of their labour free to their lord, the lives of the ancient inhabitants of Breage, [Pg 33] judged at any rate by our standards, must have been dull and hard indeed.
Each manor had its own court for the trial of cases which concerned only persons living on the manor; this court was under the presidency of the baron or thane, assisted by ten freemen. Where the freemen were not to be found, as in our Breage manors, cases were tried by the Court of the Hundred in which the manor was situated. ”

“ Thus the Court Rolls of a manor of the fourteenth century--for before the statute _Quia Emptores_ I suspect that they were kept with much less regularity and much less care than they were afterwards--are practically the _registers of the deaths_ of all occupiers of land within the manor; and, as every householder was an occupier of land, the death of every householder may be said to be inscribed upon the Rolls. ”

“ Consul whether every dying person, even a condemned criminal, had power to leave his goods and chattels to whomsoever he would? And when he answered, "Yes, all but the clothes, which belong of right to the executioner," she said, "Well, then, the constable may take my clothes, but none shall have my bed save my faithful old maid-servant Ilse!" Hereupon the housekeeper began to curse and revile my child loudly, who heeded her not, but stepped out at the door toward the cart, where there stood so many people that naught could be seen save head against head. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Another class of inhabitants remains to be mentioned—the Cotters. cotters. These are the poor of the manor, who hold a cottage and garden, or perhaps one acre or half an acre in the fields. They were unfree in condition, and in most manors their services were modelled upon those of the villeins. From their ranks were usually drawn the shepherd of the manor, the bee-keeper and other minor officials of the manor.
A complicated organization necessarily involves administrators. Just as the services of the tenants and even their names vary from manor to manor, so does the nature of the staff. ”