Manorial Court Records -Buried Treasure

 

Manorial court records are remarkably frustrating documents giving a limited peek into the lives of long-dead inhabitants.  The exist from the early 1200s onwards and can illuminate the lives of  ordinary people from the late medieval onwards.  I have investigated the early modern court records from Worfield in Shropshire and the details they reveal can be fascinating,  one presentment was to prevent pigs from being allowed in the churchyard!  However they are often overlooked as useful sources. This probably because of issues of accessing the information and the assumption that, with the end of the feudal era, they become less relevant.  However, even into the 16th and 17th century they contain valuable information about the lives of the manor’s inhabitants, especially when combined with other records such as constables accounts and lay subsidies.

Although the records are kept in Latin, the courts were of course conducted in English, so the Latin used is formulaic and makes much use of contractions. That said the standardised nature of the records does mean that with a little practice it is possible to extract the details without requiring an extensive knowledge of Latin.  This fact suggests that although the rolls are original documents, they may not capture all the subtleties and details of proceedings. Indeed, the amount of detail provided can vary considerably between rolls. This could indicate that some rolls were for whatever reason completed sometime afterwards rather than being taken down at the time. And indeed as the photo shows they are long rolls (thus court rolls) of parchment, which can contain a number of court sittings.

 Using manorial court records, it is possible to watch social changes such as the enclosure of fields and the rise and fall of various social concerns. The presentments themselves range from petty crime through the infraction of national statutes such as the requirement to practise of archery to various local concerns such as failing to use the manorial mill. We can also be reasonably confident that of all the presentments and issues raised in the manorial courts, many more went unrecorded. Over time the concerns and emphasis of the courts changed. This probably does not mean that there were changes in what was happening, but it suggests changes in what was felt to be worthy of censure or what was noteworthy. If many offences are ignored or unrecorded, it is possible that the ones that do actually appear are evidence of broader social tensions.

The recording of the information itself can lead to problems. Names are usually Latinized and this coupled with irregular spelling can make following the appearances of individuals and or families from roll to roll something of a challenge. It is not always possible to be sure whether a named individual is one person or a series of individuals. In the Worfield records, many of the surnames derive from locations, and this can complicate the following of individuals and families. In the earliest period available 1250-1400, surnames are not wholly fixed, so the same individual may be presented under multiple names.

In addition to being written in latin the writing is secretary script and that requires some practice to read. Couple that with spellings that derive from local accents and archaic words and some rolls require more attention than the information contained ultimately justifies but you can't be sure about that until you are done. Spending a couple of hours to little gain is one of the frustrations of archival work.

The rolls and other manorial documents are primarily concerned with the inhabitants who had official rights or responsibilities or caused some nuisance within the manor community. This means that women, children and servants appear far less frequently as they were generally the responsibility of a (male) tenant. Women, as has been discussed at length by many historians, are significantly under-represented in the manorial records apart from their appearance in land transactions. When we do see women, their agency is reduced. For example, in one instance a wife commits an offence, but her husband is required to pay the fine. Sometimes women’s first names are not recorded, particularly in the case of widows who often appear in the records only as Widow X.

Also, these documents are concerned with the community offices, and we get frustratingly few details about daily lives, at best an occasional reference after someone's name might reveal an occupation (butcher, clerk). They do not tell us anything about manorial demographics; age, occupation, proportions of women and men and we can only loosely suggest the social stratifications of freeholders such as cottagers and the like from jury information and other clues contained within the rolls. The absence of detailed tenant rolls makes it more of a challenge to understand the social standing of the individuals who appear in court in any role.

The absence of robust data on population across the medieval and early modern period makes it hard to consider presentments as a percentage of the population. It is therefore impossible to do more than speculate on whether increases in the raw numbers of specific items are the result of increased population, as the result of an increase in the numbers of incidents recorded or merely a change of officers and thus with differing concerns. For this reason, trends and changes in proportions of various presentments are more reliable indicators of the changing nature of court business.

Even when we have the all the details, understanding what was happening can be difficult. The descriptions and terminology can vary even when describing the same case. Even worse sometimes the same term may cover different actions. Trespass is a typical example; it can relate just to straying animals, it may refer to a land ownership issue, or it may be an act of intentional or unintentional straying onto another villager’s land. As Mark Bailey says “it is unwise to read too much into the use of different phrases and terms”. Likewise, occasionally in Shropshire there is periodic reference to ‘concealing’ which seems relatively straightforward until in 1462 Thomas Underhill is accused of concealing a barn. From this, it is a fair deduction that concealing means failing to reveal information rather than physically hiding something.

Despite the limitations, we should not underestimate the value of these records. Manorial courts were the primary source of justice for the manor’s inhabitants. It provided a forum for local issues and concerns to be aired. Finally, its role in the development and maintenance of local hierarchies, the impact on a person’s status in the community that an appearance in the courts in one guise or another would have had, should not be underestimated.

 

Further Reading

Mark Bailey, The English Manor 1200-1500 (Manchester, 2002)

Lotte Fikkers ‘Early Modern Women in the English Courts of Law’ Literature Compass

K.L. French, G.G. Gibbs, B. Kumin (eds) The Parish in Early English Life1400-1600 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)

Christopher Harrison, ‘Manor Courts and the Governance of Tudor England’, in Christopher Brooks Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150-1900, (London, 1997)

Marjorie McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England 1370-1600 (Cambridge, 1998)

J. Smith, Worfield: the History of a Shropshire Parish from earliest times, (Perton, 2017),

M. Spufford, M. Contrasting Communities: English Villages in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. (Cambridge. 1974)

D.Stuart, Manorial Court Records, (Chichester, 1992)