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Manorialism

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History 1500 and
before (including Roman Britain)

   Generic plan of a mediaeval manor; open-field strip farming, some
   enclosures, triennial crop rotation, demesne and manse, common
   woodland, pasturage and meadow
   Generic plan of a mediaeval manor; open-field strip farming, some
   enclosures, triennial crop rotation, demesne and manse, common
   woodland, pasturage and meadow

   Manorialism or Seigneurialism is the organization of rural economy and
   society in medieval western and parts of central Europe, characterised
   by the vesting of legal and economic power in a lord supported
   economically from his own direct landholding and from the obligatory
   contributions of a legally subject part of the peasant population under
   his jurisdiction. These obligations could be payable in labor (the
   French term corvée is conventionally applied), produce ("in kind") or
   rarely money.

   The word derives from traditional inherited divisions of the
   countryside reassigned as local jurisdictions known as manors or
   seigneuries; each manor being subject to a lord (French seigneur),
   usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a
   higher lord (see Feudalism). The lord held a manor court governed by
   public law and local custom. Not all territorial seigneurs were
   secular: bishops and abbots held lands that entailed similar
   obligations.

   In the generic plan of a medieval manor from Shepherd's Historical
   Atlas (illustration, right) the strips of individually-worked land in
   the open field system are immediately apparent. In this plan the manor
   house is set slightly apart from the village but equally often the
   village grew up around the forecourt of the manor, formerly walled,
   while the manor lands stretched away outside, as still may be seen at
   Petworth House. As concerns for privacy increased in the 18th century,
   manor houses were often located a farther distance from the village.
   When a grand new house was required by the new owner of Harlaxton
   Manor, Lincolnshire, in the 1830s, the site of the existing manor house
   at the edge of its village was abandoned for a new one, isolated in its
   park, with the village out of view.

   In an agrarian society, the conditions of land tenure underlie all
   social or economic factors. There were two legal systems of
   pre-manorial landholding. One, the most common, was the system of
   holding land " allodially" in full outright ownership. The other was a
   use of precaria or benefices in which land was held conditionally,
   (giving us our word "precarious"). To these two systems the Carolingian
   monarchs added a third, the aprisio, which linked manorialism with
   feudalism. The aprisio made its first appearance in Charlemagne's
   province of Septimania in the south of France, when Charlemagne had to
   settle the Visigothic refugees who had fled with his retreating forces
   after the failure of his Saragossa expedition of 778. He solved this
   problem by allotting "desert" tracts of uncultivated land belonging to
   the royal fisc under direct control of the emperor. These holdings
   aprisio entailed specific conditions. The earliest specific aprisio
   grant that has been identified was at Fontjoncouse, near Narbonne (see
   Lewis, links).

   In former Roman settlements, a system of villas dating from Late
   Antiquity was inherited by the medieval world.

Common features

   Manors each consisted of up to three classes of land:
    1. Demesne, the part directly controlled by the lord and used for the
       benefit of his household and dependents;
    2. Dependent ( serf or villein) holdings carrying the obligation that
       the peasant household supply the lord with specified labour
       services or a part of its output (or cash in lieu thereof), subject
       to the custom attached to the holding; and
    3. Free peasant land, without such obligation but otherwise subject to
       manorial jurisdiction and custom, and owing money rent fixed at the
       time of the lease.

   Additional sources of income from the lord included charges for use of
   his mill, bakery or wine-press, or for the right to hunt or to let pigs
   feed in his woodland, as well as court revenues and single payments on
   each change of tenant. On the other side of the account, manorial
   administration involved significant expenses, perhaps a reason why
   smaller manors tended to rely less on villein tenure.

   Dependent holdings were held nominally by arrangement of lord and
   tenant, but tenure became in practice almost universally hereditary,
   with a payment made to the lord on each succession of another member of
   the family. Villein land could not be abandoned, at least until
   demographic and economic circumstances made flight a viable
   proposition; nor could they be passed to a third party without the
   lord's permission, and the customary payment.

   Though not free, villeins were by no means in the same position as
   slaves: they enjoyed legal rights, subject to local custom, and had
   recourse to the law, subject to court charges which were an additional
   source of manorial income. Sub-letting of villein holdings was common,
   and labour on the demesne might be commuted into an additional money
   payment, as happened increasingly from the 13th century.

   This description of a manor house at Chingford, Essex in England was
   recorded in a document for the Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral when it
   was granted to Robert Le Moyne in 1265:

          He received also a sufficient and handsome hall well ceiled with
          oak. On the western side is a worthy bed, on the ground, a stone
          chimney, a wardrobe and a certain other small chamber; at the
          eastern end is a pantry and a buttery. Between the hall and the
          chapel is a sideroom. There is a decent chapel covered with
          tiles, a portable altar, and a small cross. In the hall are four
          tables on trestles. There are likewise a good kitchen covered
          with tiles, with a furnace and ovens, one large, the other
          small, for cakes, two tables, and alongside the kitchen a small
          house for baking. Also a new granary covered with oak shingles,
          and a building in which the dairy is contained, though it is
          divided. Likewise a chamber suited for clergymen and a necessary
          chamber. Also a hen-house. These are within the inner gate.
          Likewise outside of that gate are an old house for the servants,
          a good table, long and divided, and to the east of the principal
          building, beyond the smaller stable, a solar for the use of the
          servants. Also a building in which is contained a bed, also two
          barns, one for wheat and one for oats. These buildings are
          enclosed with a moat, a wall, and a hedge. Also beyond the
          middle gate is a good barn, and a stable of cows, and another
          for oxen, these old and ruinous. Also beyond the outer gate is a
          pigstye.

                From J.H. Robinson, trans., University of Pennsylvania
                Translations and Reprints (1897) in Middle Ages, Volume I:
                pp283–284.

Variation among manors

   Like feudalism which, together with manorialism, forms the legal and
   organisational framework of what is often termed feudal society,
   manorial structures were not uniform among societies exhibiting such
   characteristics. In the later Middle Ages, areas of incomplete or
   non-existent manorialisation persisted while the manorial economy
   underwent substantial development with changing economic conditions.

   Not all manors contained all three kinds of land: as an average,
   demesne accounted for roughly a third of the arable area and villein
   holdings rather more; but some manors consisted solely of demesne,
   others solely of peasant holdings. The proportion of unfree and free
   tenures could likewise vary greatly, necessitating greater or lesser
   reliance on wage labour for the performance of agricultural work on the
   demesne.

   The proportion of the cultivated area in demesne tended to be greater
   in smaller manors, while the share of villein land was greater in large
   manors, providing the lord of the latter with a larger potential supply
   of obligatory labour for demesne work. The proportion of free tenements
   was generally less variable, but tended to be somewhat greater on the
   smaller manors.

   Manors varied similarly in their geographical arrangement: most did not
   coincide with a single village, but rather consisted of parts of two or
   more villages, most of the latter containing also parts of at least one
   other manor. This situation sometimes led to replacement by cash
   payments of the demesne labour obligations of those peasants living
   furthest from the lord's estate.

   As was the case with peasant plots, the demesne was not a single
   territorial unit, but consisted rather of a central house with
   neighbouring land and estate buildings, plus strips dispersed through
   the manor alongside free and villein ones: in addition, the lord might
   lease free tenements belonging to neighbouring manors, as well as
   holding other manors some distance away to provide a greater range of
   produce.

   Nor were manors held necessarily by lay lords rendering military
   service (or again, cash in lieu) to their superior: a substantial share
   (estimated by value at 17% in England in 1086) belonged directly to the
   king, and a greater proportion (rather more than a quarter) were held
   by bishoprics and monasteries. Ecclesiastical manors tended to be
   larger, with a significantly greater villein area than neighbouring lay
   manors.

   The effect of circumstances on manorial economy is complex and at times
   contradictory: upland conditions have been seen as tending to preserve
   peasant freedoms (livestock husbandry in particular being less
   labour-intensive and therefore less demanding of villein services); on
   the other hand, some such areas of Europe have been said to show some
   of the most oppressive manorial conditions, while lowland eastern
   England is credited with an exceptionally large free peasantry, in part
   a legacy of Scandinavian settlement.

   Similarly, the spread of money economy is often seen as having
   stimulated the replacement of labour services by money payments, but
   the growth of the money supply and resulting inflation after 1170
   initially led nobles to take back leased estates and to re-impose
   labour dues as the value of fixed cash payments declined in real terms.

Historical development and geographical distribution

   The term is most often used with reference to medieval Western Europe.
   Antecedents of the system can be traced to the rural economy of the
   later Roman Empire. With a declining birthrate and population, labor
   was the key factor of production. Successive administrations tried to
   stabilise the imperial economy by freezing the social structure into
   place: sons were to succeed their fathers in their trade. Councillors
   were forbidden to resign, and coloni, the cultivators of land, were not
   to move from the demesne they were attached to. They were on their way
   to becoming serfs. Several factors conspired to merge the status of
   former slaves and former free farmers into a dependent class of such
   coloni. Laws of Constantine I around 325 reenforced both the negative
   semi-servile status of the coloni and limited their rights to sue in
   the courts. Their numbers were augmented by barbarian foederati who
   were permitted to settle within the imperial boundaries.

   As the Germanic kingdoms succeeded Roman authority in the West in the
   fifth century, Roman landlords were often simply replaced by Gothic or
   Germanic ones, with little change to the underlying situation. The
   process of rural self-sufficiency was given an abrupt boost in the
   eighth century, when normal trade in the Mediterranean Sea was
   disrupted. The thesis put forward by Henri Pirenne, disputed by many,
   supposes that the Arab conquests forced the medieval economy into even
   greater ruralisation and gave rise to the classic feudal pattern of
   varying degrees of servile peasantry underpinning a hierarchy of
   localised power centres.

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