History of Lordships of the Manor.

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.

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By the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-66), the Lord of the Manor, was the local leader and 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.

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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.

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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.

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The title of Baron is a title of Nobility. 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.

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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. 

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.

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It is easy to judge, from this plethora rights, how important the Lord of the Manor was, not only socially, but economically.

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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.

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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.

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The right to hold market and fairs, to common land and manorial waste; to all the usual manorial incidents such as merchets, heriots, wardships, tolls, and escheats, pickage, stallage, turbary, and pannage; to mines and quarries within the Manor; Fishing rights: of free warren, free chase, and free forest; Timber rights; over rivers and foreshore.

The essence of a Baron's status, according to Professor Sir Frank Stenton  "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 specialised... a specialisation that was not to begin to take shape until the late 13th century with barons by writ and, much later still, by letters patent".

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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."

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"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.

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.

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At the end of the Middle Ages the great noble families were able to concentrate power, wealth and honours in a very few hands. Most of these families were killed off or forfeited their lands in the Wars of the Roses and the process of was completed by Henry VII and VIII, who also seized the monastic lands. 

Such as the Lordship of the Rufford and the Lordship of the Liberties of Rufford and the Lordship of Rufford Abbey, Nottinghamshire.

Along with other religious houses the monastery at Rufford Abbey was dissolved in 1538.The commissioner appointed by Henry VIII to administer the surrender was Sir Giles Strangways.

 

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