swuklink.com: Manors

The popular conception of the medieval manor is of a compact unit consisting of a village, a manor farm, a the manorhouse occupied by a resident "lord of the manor". While this may have been true for some compact manors, it is far from the rule as the manor was a unit of administration, particularly used for assessing taxation, and some manors such as Canford Magna in Dorset (which included the tiny fishing village which has grown into the town of Poole) were vast in area. Others might include outlying areas within a county or even beyond the county borders.

The small medieval market town of Christchurch in Dorset (formerly in Hampshire), with its huge church built by Ranulf Flambard was divided into two manors; the secular manor of "Twyneham" and the ecclesiastical manor, "Priory Manor of Christchurch Twyneham" centered on Christchurch Priory.

The manor, like all land, would be the feudal possession of the monarch and held from him by a lord. Manorial affairs and justice within the boundaries of the manor which were not reserved for the King's courts would be administered by the court leet. It was at the court leet that rents and other feudal dues would be collected and the customary laws of the manor administered by the lord of the manor or his representative.

Some feaudal tenants might possess only a single manor and be resident there although if, for example, they held their land by "sergeantry" (as a reward for a service rendered to the monarch such as keeper of the royal hawks), they might be required to spend a great deal of time wherever the royal court happened to be at the time.

The tenants-in-chief who held many manors were powerfull barons with many manors throughtout the country (the powerfull Count Robert of Mortain, the Conqueror's half-brother, for example, held 797 manors throughout England and his seat was at Castle Monatcute in Somerset in which county he held 87 manors from the king) might only see some of the manors which they possessed one or twice, if at all, during their lifetimes.

The monarch would retain many lucrative or strategically placed manors and the tenants of these royal manors were frequently nearly as important and powerfull as the tenants-in-chief themselves.

Some royal manors remain the property of the Corwn to this day. The manor of Portland at the southern extremity of Dorset, for example, still pays an rent to the monarch of a red rose.

When William the Conqueror was accepted as king of England by the Saxon witan he promised to rule by the laws of Edward the Confessor. He ordered the compilation of the Domesday survey in 1086 to assess all the possessions of the feudal landholders under him for taxation and this survey was based on the manor as a unit suggesting that the manor had its origins before the Norman conquest of 1066 in Saxon times.

Some historians have suggested that the manor developed from the Roman "villae", large farming estates usually set about a central villa which were owned by a wealthy Roman but worked by British slaves.

They propose that the villae did not disappear completely when the Romans departed the British Isles early in the 5th century but that they were the pattern for the Saxon and Mediaeval manors.

This is most unlikely, firstly because manors were universal whereas the villae were not with the majority of the population living in villages and, secondly, whereas all freemen attended the Anglo-Saxon hundred courts, all on the Roman villa were subject to the autocratic will of the owner.