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A History of Lordships LORDSHIPS of the Manor are among the oldest titles in England and pre-date the Norman Conquest, begun by William I at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Historians are not agreed on how the word Manor originated. It has been suggested that it is an import, manoir, or perhaps even older, from the Latin, manerium. Nor are historians sure whether it was a purely Saxon concept, its origins lying in the need for self-defence down the east coast against succeeding incursions by Germanic tribes and later Vikings. They are agreed, however, that the Manor was the pivot of the Feudal System, defined by the 11th century "by certain ecclesiastics who propounded the theory that human society was divided into three orders, the oratores, the bellatores, and the laboratores: those who protected it with their prayers and their swords, and those who tilled the earth to support the other two classes" (Dr A P M Wright, Senior Assistant Editor, VCH writing in the Bulletin of the Manorial Society of Great Britain, 1981). By the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-66), the Lord of the Manor, be he the local leader, or some great suzerain, such as Earl Godwinson of Mercia, was the most important person in village affairs, whether it be collecting taxes for the King or dispensing "high justice", the power to inflict death in his courts. Historians are also agreed that the Normans institutionalised the Manorial System in Domesday Book, compiled for William the Conqueror in 1086 and listing 13,418 Manors and their owners. It was an inventory of the wealth of the new kingdom and, as such, is still a Government document, housed at the Public Record Office where it is known as Public Record No 1. The conquerors also introduced the word feudum, from feuum (the Latin form of the Old English feoh, cattle, money, possessions in general); either a landholder's holding, or lands held under the terms of a specific grant. It took the 18th century, however, to come up with the expression "Feudal System" which is made to have uniform operation in the High Middle Ages. Few things could be further from the truth. The Feudal System was versatile and diverse, which is why its form of landholding survived in many parts of England and Wales until the 1920s. In return for his protection and the land he gave them, the people on the Manor, from slaves to freemen, owed their Lord certain services, ranging from money rents to working so many days a week on the Lord's "home farm", or demesne, without pay (week-work). In theory, most men held their land "at pleasure", though in practice the "customary tenants", or villeins, were fairly secure, provided they undertook their services: week-work, the harvest boon (precaria) when they helped the Lord get his corn in, used the Lord's mill to grind their corn and his fold for their animals so that he might benefit from the manure on his land. If the tenants of the Manor disagreed, they went before the manorial court, presided over by one of the Lord's officers, usually the Bailiff, who decided and imposed fines often called "arbitrary" though, in fact, usually determined by custom. If there were some crime committed, the Lord could arrest, try, and punish upto "pit and gallows", gibbet, and mutilation. In the High Middle Ages of the 12th century, a Lord could simply say: "it is my will" and there is surely no better basis for prestige than this. Indeed, the great "nobles" of the period expressed their power through the number of Manors they held, many becoming barons by tenure and, by the reign of Edward I, barons by writ of summons to Parliament. Throughout the Middle Ages, the English nobility was a caste whose power was based on the ownership of land through the Manor. Their peerages, unlike those on the continent, were purely honorific and they lost them if they lost their landed status. Nothing is immutable and in time the powers of the Lord were diminished. For example, no self-respecting King of England could permit any other than his own appointed officials to have power of life and death over the King's subjects. From the reign of Henry II, the royal itinerant justices fought a long battle with the Lord of the Manor over his powers of criminal jurisdiction. Of course, the kings eventually won, but when Elizabeth I instituted justices of the peace, it was the Lord of the Manor to whom she looked to fill this post as they had the status and local knowledge necessary to win respect. Manorial Lords are by no means missing from the lists of justices, deputy lieutenants, or even lords lieutenant today. At the economic level, the medieval period saw changes. A substantial increase in the population in the 13th century meant that the irksome duty of week-work from a reluctant peasantry became increasingly unproductive. Agricultural science did not improve until the 18th century so that land that had been waste at Domesday was being taken under the plough by the 14th century. The result was the evolution of paid labourers (men no longer tied to the land through the Lordship and, importantly, "free" in a manner of speaking) and the reclamation (assarting) of waste which was granted out by Lords on very favourable terms to people who became copyholders, effectively freeholders who held title to their land by copy of the manorial court roll in return for a half-yearly rent payable at the Lord's court. The customary tenants gradually benefitted from this process too and became copyholders. Although frequently strict in the application of their manorial rights, the Church, the largest landowner, tended to be a revolutionizing institution, its priesthood, right up to the highest prelates, originating in the vast majority of cases from the peasantry. Lords would often apply to the King for special rights within the Manor. The most valuable of these was the monopoly to hold a market and fair in the Manor and these are the most common among Royal Charters to Manorial Lords: there were virtually no shops as we know them, apart from London, Norwich, and York, and retailing was done at markets, the Lord usually being granted in his Charter a Pie Powder Court by which he regulated the activities of buyers and sellers. He derived a financial benefit, first, from letting booths and stalls, and, second, from the profits of the justice his officers meted out. There are charters for foreshore rights, rights of wreck, treasure trove, free warren (sporting rights), riparian and and piscaries rights (river banks and fishing). These are special rights. Droit de seigneur, or jus primae noctis, the right to have the bride on her wedding night, is largely a fiction. It was an alleged right of feudal lords in medieval Europe to sleep the first night with the bride of any of his vassals. There is some evidence of such a right in some primitive societies. The only evidence of its existence in Europe is of payments by a vassal in lieu of enforcement of the right, and it is probable that it was merely a kind of tax like the avail or redemption payment in lieu of the lord's right to select a bride for his vassal." (The Oxford Companion to Law, ed. David M Walker). The myth has perhaps been perpetuated in the novels of Jane Austen and Anthony Troloppe. The technical term for licence to marry was a fine of Merchet. General rights were the copyhold income from the tenantry, manorial waste, common land, the profits of justice in the manorial court, heriots (payment of "the best beast or chattel") on death and inheritance, murage and scutage (a "tax" for self-defence), pontage (a "tax" for bridge repair), mineral excavation rights, and many others. It is easy to judge, from this plethora rights, how important the Lord of the Manor was, not only socially, but economically. In 1922, the Government of the day enacted the most thoroughgoing legislation touching property in England and Wales. So far as the Lord of the Manor was concerned, the Law of Property Act abolished copyhold tenure, taking away his right to be Lord of the soil save that which he owned directly. He was compensated and the copyholds were converted on 1 January 1926 into freehold, or 999-year leasehold. But the Act went on to confirm many of the historic rights long enjoyed by the Lord of the Manor: the right to market and fair, mineral excavation (subject to the enfranchisement of the copyhold, the subsoil still belongs to the Lord of the Manor), fishing rights, sporting rights, manorial waste (principally the verges of the road and those areas in rural Manors which do not appear to belong to anyone), common land rights (subject to the Common Land Registration Act 1965), even the village green. Some Lords today charge a manorial wayleave and are paid by British Telecom £1 a year for every telegraph pole planted in the roadside verges. Others operate markets which require planning consent. Still others, in conjunction with the freeholder, employ mineral excavation companies to take out gravel, or sand if the subsoil contains a commercially exploitable deposit. The operable historic rights associated with their Manor must be legally established by each purchaser. Those relating to Manors in the past included: The right to hold market and fairs The right to common land and manorial waste The right to all the usual manorial incidents such as merchets, heriots, wardships, tolls, and escheats, pickage, stallage, turbary, and pannage The rights to mines and quarries within the Manor Fishing rights Rights of free warren, free chase, and free forest Timber rights Rights over rivers and foreshore. The essence of a Baron's status, according to Professor Sir Frank Stenton (The First Century of English Feudalism, Oxford University Press, 1932), was his direct personal relationship with his Lord, and there can be no closer relationship in medieval society than the swearing of fealty to the King himself. The Lords of Manors, or "mesne tenants", as Professor Stenton describes them, "appear as a body of very important people" in the 12th century. "There can be no doubt of their identity, as a class, with the honorial barons of 12th century charters... It is an important element in... the Anglo-Norman state". Such mesne tenants who held Manors in the 12th century were honorial barons, or territorial peers. Professor Stenton adds that these early references to a lord's barons "are valuable, historically, for they show that the barons who appear at a later time in Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, and Durham did not owe their style to a near analogy between their position and that of a tenant-in-chief of the Crown, but that they were representatives of men regarded as barons already in the Norman period. Their titles come, in fact, before the conception of baronage was specialized... a specialization that was not to begin to take shape until the late 13th century with barons by writ and, much later still, by letters patent". Scotland, where land law is still feudal, has long recognized the feudal barony as distinct from the barony by writ or patent, and still does. Many of England's most ancient titles of what we are now pleased to call nobility are based on baronies by tenure: eg Earl Ranulph de Meschines grants the Barony of Greystock, Cumbria, to Lyulph, and Henry I confirms this landholding. Lyulph, whose ancestors are completely unknown, is ancestor to eight generations of feudal Barons of Greystock, before the ninth generation, in Ralph, is summoned to Parliament as a baron by writ in 1295. The difference between the baron by writ, or patent, and the honorial baron, or baron by tenure was that the latter would not expect to sit in the councils of the realm unless summoned beyond the reign of Henry III; the former can now sit in the House of Lords as of right. The present Duke of Norfolk, Miles FitzAlan-Howard, is feudal Earl of Arundel (besides being parliamentary earl), a feudal title which, like Lord of the Manor, is protected in the 1922 Property Act. The Duke's ancestor, William de Albini (Albany), married Adeliza, widow of Henry I and daughter of Godfrey Duke of Lorraine. Adeliza had in dower Arundel Castle, Sussex, and William became Earl of Arundel in 1139 by this marriage. The feudal Earldom of Arundel came into the Howard family in 1580, on the death of Henry FitzAlan, 18th feudal Earl of Arundel, whose daughter and heiress, Mary, was mother to Philip FitzAlan-Howard, 19th feudal Earl. It was not until the passing of an Act of Parliament in 1628 that Thomas FitzAlan-Howard, 20th feudal Earl of Arundel, also became parliamentary Earl of Arundel. The Duke's feudal Earldom, like a Manor title, is vested in property. The parliamentary earldom would descend to the Duke's successors as specified in the Act and subsequent Acts and patents; but, presumably, were the family to part with Arundel Castle, there would be a feudal Earl of Arundel in addition to a parliamentary earl of the same name. Helen Cam, in her Introduction to Law-Finders and Law-Makers in Medieval England (Merlin Press, London), say: "Whilst the King's vassals fulfilled their responsibilities and vindicated their rights in his courts, all over England, their own sub-vassals, the baron's barons, were acting as judges in their Lords' courts, and helping to adjust the conflicting claims of the old and new tenants of the honour and the manor." In describing thegnship, that Saxon Lordship with which Domesday is scattered, Professor F W Maitland (Domesday Book and Beyond, Cambridge University Press, 1897), calls wealthy thegns barones maiores and "less-thegns" barones minores. "The household of a great man, but more especially the King's household, is the cradle of thegnship... Then the King... begins to give land to his thegns, and thus the nature of thegnship is modified. The thegn no longer lives in his lord's court; he is a warrior endowed with land. Then the thegnship becomes more than a relationship; it becomes a status." Right into the early Angevin period (circa 1160), the King's barons, Professor Stenton writes (op cit), "remained a large and indeterminate body, defined by a rough equality of rank and a general similarity of territorial position, but by nothing that even approximated to any rule of law". The word Baron is used by historians and writers today in a way that it is safe to assume that the author is thinking of a tenant-in-chief of the King. "In a general survey of constitutional history," Professor Maitland remarks, "it is convenient to use the term in this limited sense. But the usage receives no support from the private charters of the Norman period, in which earls, bishops, and many lords of lesser status continually speak of their own tenants as barones." "Dark as is the early history of the manor," Professor Maitland writes in The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge University Press, 1926), "we can see that before the Conquest England is covered by what in all substantive points are manors, though the term manor is brought hither by the Normans." Since this is so and since, as already observed, there can be no surer basis of prestige than to say, "it is my will", the status conveyed by Manorial Lordship, or Feudal Barony pre-dates the peerage of England, as it is understood today, by at least 200 years. The former is vested in jurisdiction over land, the second in the will of the sovereign and is purely honorific. The military aristocracy of the 12th century would, I suspect, laugh at the later concept of nobility through pedigree. Most would probably not have known who their grand parents were. Nothing is known of the family of Hugh the Great, Duke of France, who ruled that cradle of the chivalric ideal. William the Conqueror's principal followers were opportunistic thugs, most of whom are never heard of again after Domesday Book; while even of those who went on to become earls and bishops later, we know virtually nothing of their antecedents. Early pedigree charts are fragmentary. The Anglo-Norman period was one of great rises to, and falls from, fortune. There was no time to consider such niceties as "nobility", or pedigree. A great family is suddenly there: take the celebrated house of Bellême, who rise to instant prominence; their "ancestor" of one generation seems to have been a crossbowman. He becomes a Lord of Manors and, being practical, it was this wealth that was all that mattered. The Anglo-Norman and early Angevin monarchs were only interested in a man's landholding and territorial power. In the French or German sense of the word, medieval England had no nobility; that is to say that among the freemen there was no intrinsically superior class enjoying a privileged legal status of its own, transmitted by descent. In appearance, English society was an astonishingly egalitarian structure. That said, essentially, it was based on the existence of an extremely rigid hierarchic division, though the line was drawn at a lower level than elsewhere in Europe. It meant that on English soil, the freeman was in law scarcely less distinguishable from the nobleman. But the freemen themselves were an oligarchy. Yet England had an aristocracy as powerful as any in Europe - more powerful perhaps because the land of the peasants, through the Manor, was still more at its mercy. It was a class of Manorial Lords, of warrior chieftains, of royal officials, and of knights of the shire - all of them men whose mode of life differed greatly and consciously from that of the common run of freemen. At the top was the narrow circle of earls and barons. During the 13th century, this highest group began to be endowed with fairly definite privileges, but these were almost exclusively political and honorific in nature; and, above all, being attached to the fief de dignité, to the Honor, they were transmissable only to the eldest son. In short, the class of noblemen in England remained as a whole more a social than a legal class. Naturally, although power and revenues were as a rule inherited, and although, as on the Continent, the prestige of birth was greatly prized, this group was too ill-defined not to remain largely open. In the 13th century, the possession of landed wealth was sufficient to authorize the assumption of knighthood, in fact made it obligatory. Something like a century and a half later, it officially confirmed the right (always restricted by the characteristic rule to free tenure) to elect in the shires the representatives of the Commons of the land. And, although in theory, these same representatives - they were known by the significant name of knights of the shire and had originally, in fact, to be chosen from among the dubbed knights - were required to furnish proof of hereditary armorial bearings, it does not appear that in practice any family of solid wealth and social distinction ever encountered much difficulty in obtaining permission to use such emblems. There were no "letters of nobility" among the English at this period - the creation of baronets by the needy House of Stewart was only a belated imitation of French practices. There was no need for them. The actual situation was enough. We must wait until the 14th century, or possibly the very late 13th, before the idea of chivalry, or prudhommie, or pedigree begin to become important in England as concepts, setting some men apart from others, and reflecting, among other things, a more settled state in society. Edward III inaugurates the "Round Table" in the Order of the Garter. Parliament, in 1351, in the Statute of Labourers, attempts for the first time to restrict the acquisition of land and Manors by wealthy merchants from impoverished "old money". Parliament tries again and again in the 14th and throughout the 15th centuries to stop commercial new money from wearing certain furs and velvets, or owning more than 40 acres in the country. Such efforts were thwarted by economic realities and the Kings of England themselves, the Tudors particularly, preferring new wealth and the cleverness that spawned it, to the old wealth and jealousies that sustained it. Badges, banners, flags, seals were originally intended as means by which a man might be identified in time of battle, perhaps, or on papers which the illiterate, many of whom included the nobility, could recognize. Henry V established something approximating to a formalization of these devices. Richard III in 1484 established the College of Arms which contains a number of Household officers: the three Kings of Arms, Garter, Clarenceux, and Norroy and Ulster; a number of Officers in Ordinary (Heralds); and Pursuivants and Officers Extraordinary. They have granted arms to men and women of virtue for more than 500 years, despite conceits, which have appeared in every generation since 1484 - even to this day - which would ossify the institution. It has been mainly by keeping close to the practical things which give real power, and avoiding the paralysis that overtakes social classes, which are too sharply divided and too dependent on birth, that the English aristocracy acquired the dominant position it retained for centuries, and to some extent still does. In purchasing a Manor, therefore, one inherits the status that this form of tenure implies and becomes the successor in title to a line of men and women, many of whom have had a pronounced influence on the history of the British Isles. Robert Smith Chairman The Manorial Society of Great Britain