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 agreed 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".

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.

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.

In return for the protection of the Lord of the Manor 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).

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.

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.

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 benefited from this process too and became copyholders.

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.

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.

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 (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 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".

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.

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 Winterborne St Martin). Along with other religious houses the monastery at Abbotsbury was dissolved in 1538.The commissioner appointed by Henry VIII to administer the surrender was Sir Giles Strangways. Four years after enforcing the closure of the Abbey of St. Peter he bought the buildings, its manor, land, 2 mills and the Swannery. The family are well known in the area today. The Winterbourne St Martin land was sold later in 1546.

The result was that most functioning honours passed the Crown. When the Crown sold its manors they were granted to be held ut de corona, not under honour. As a result there are few honours left. The Crown itself has some. The two Royal Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall are honours and include within them subsidiary honours as well as manors. Today, much land within the Manor of Winterborne St Martin is held by the Duchy of Cornwall.

Robert Smith, Chairman, The Manorial Society of Great Britain
Abridged by Gerald Duke LLB (hons)