G2G: Category Request: Lords of the Manor

Question

We have a category request and categorization project needs help placing it within the structure:

Member submitting request: David Horsley (Horsley-831)

Proposed category name or topic: Lords of the Manor

Profile that belongs in the category: Acklom-82

Explanation and comments:

Lord of the Manor is not an aristocratic title but indicates ownership of the manor land, an administrative position where you control the leases of the manor land and control the courts governing these leases. It can be a significant source of income, if there is a lot of land as was the case in Beeford.

Although there are still Lordships of many Manors they can rarely be regarded as even a part-time occupation as very few now involve any income or duties.

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So, if this category is accepted, where would it be placed? There are two categories for manors at the present time. One for Somerset and one for Shropshire. Would the manor need to have a category, which would fall under the county level, then the specific lords would be in a subcategory under the county?

How would this best be handled? Thanks for any input. 

Comments

Most of these answers fail to read my question.  I am not interested in Manors in general, because as the replies state, there are as many manors as settlements, or even more. I am interested in those cases where "Lord of the Manor" was a significant occupation and source of income, typically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For some people it became their main source of income because there were large amounts of land involved, the leaseholds were easily transferred with the paid consent of the lord of the manor. As almost all manors were enclosed by 1850 the significance of the Lord of the Manor usually disappeared.

In the meantime, Lord of the Manor allows us to trace inheritance through families, extinction of lines and buying and sale of lordships indicates fluctuating wealth.

Perhaps a freespace profile would be a more useful approach?

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Thanks for the clarification, David, which in my response I was working toward.  What you are looking for is an OCCUPATION category, and therefore however it plays out, it would be subcategorized under various groupings of occupations.  

I think you can buy a legitimate but worthless title as lord of a specific manor today.  If your category is defined as a bona-fide occupation, it would eliminate someone living in 2020 who just bought a meaningless title.

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David, I think you can do more with a freespace page.  Having a category will only give you a group of profiles belonging to that category. On a freespace page you can add information and lines of descent etc etc. and trace the history of a specific Manor such as is done in the British History Online entries for the various Manors.

By looking at the Land Tax records and similar archive items you can find out what the income was.

People could, and did, hold more than one manor, of course. Sometimes one would be bought to provide and income for one of the sons because it came with the right to assign the living which was tied in with the Rectorship.

Some manors ended up owned by larger institutions - sold off to Oxford or Cambridge universities for example.

The lords of the manor in some of my branches do not refer to themselves like that, or use it as a title; It is not a Lordship.

They would be more likely to be called Squire. And it wasn't an occupation; they were Gentlemen or Esquires with no occupation ie ''Independent''.

Answer 1

I've long thought that Wikitree can and should eventually do something like this, but it would need to be done properly. A lot of people will have trouble understanding when a manor is a real manor and who the real lord of the manor is.

The benefit of such work is that it would be a way of following inheritances, which are often important hints about family connections. It is "prosopography". Obviously with bigger lordships like baronies genealogy has a long tradition of studying them.

*Like Joe I think it could perhaps best be done within county groups, rather than one great amorphous category.

*There probably should be a time cut-off so that we don't get silly discussions about modern houses and farms. After a certain point there are just too many, whereas I think there is real value in studying some manors in for example pre-1500.

Comments

Hm, hadn't thought of discussions about the manor hotel etc but I don't agree with you that these are only of value pre 1500. Pre 1500 records are incredibly hard to access and when you get hold of them even harder to read.  The Tithe map for Fordington. https://www.ancestry.co.uk/sharing/20777542?h=2ab6b0  shows the  little strips of land that  were held by the 67 copyholders, who held parcels known as  whole places, half places or farthingholds distributed over the fields. I haven't researched this but I'm very familiar with the 17th C surveys from this manor. I immediately saw that  one of the first names on the tithe apportionment is a William Winzar. In 1607 a John Wynzar held a whole place of 55 acres, the previous tenant was Alice, relict of John his late father.  I know  the Wynzars both wrote and witnessed several 15th and 16th C wills, they termed themselves husbandmen/yeomen. Fordington is unusual in the continuance of strip farming into the 19th C but certainly in Dorset there will probably be many  families that could be traced through manor records  because of the  very nature of copyhold tenancy. Every time a new life took over, the fine had to paid and recorded.  

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If there were a category related to manors, I'm not sure it would be useful to have a category just for the lords.  John is Lord of Manor X and Henry is Lord of Manor Y two counties away.  What they have in common is how they get their income; I don't learn anything about their possible relationships, which is what I am most often looking for.  So I think it would be more useful to have everyone related to Manor X in one category, and everyone related to Manor Y in a different category.

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@Jack that's right. Categories per manor or lordship can be used. So you can see how complicated it can and will be. (Actually I think we already have categories for such small lordships.) Each category would need to be logical (apples and apples).

@Helen, I think you are looking at another aspect of manor studies which is looking at all the smaller tenancies? This is a fascinating area of study, but it is another step further in complexity and in trying to work out which tools Wikitree has to help. I think there needs to be another type of wiki for that type of research?

Also, concerning 1500, I did not mean to propose any strict rule. But my remark was in any case mainly based on the idea of not trying to bog Wikitree down with anything too complex and intricate for its structure to handle. I was thinking of trying to use things like categories to help track big chunky inheritances like lordships.

Having said all that, there will likely be certain manors where the tenancies themselves can be usefully tracked like little lordships. I certainly don't want to dismiss ideas like that, but just wasn't thinking of it.

Answer 2

I think manors/ Lords of the Manor should be stratified under county There are a huge number

A starting place would be  https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/manor-search ( just do a search by county to see the number of potential categories).

Answer 3

I am not sure how this would be helpful.  A manor in medieval England was essentially a district or subdivision of county which was owned or held by a feudal tenure.  A “lord of the manor” was not a title, but simply a way of saying someone owned this piece of land.  If you were to create categories for manors, you would have many thousands of categories with a fairly small handful of profiles that would fit into each category – not very useful.

Also, considering manors were often held by multiple layers of feudal tenure, were divided and redivided, were bought and sold, gifted, held in dower, etc. it is often impossible to say who the “lord of the manor” was.  Also, it was not uncommon for a high-ranking person (e.g. kings, earls, etc.) to own dozens and even hundreds of manors – are we supposed to list them all? Also, I am not even sure the term is appropriate – I have never seen it used in thousands of contemporary documents; is it more of a modern construct?

If you were to create categories for manors, they definitely would be subcategories of a county since manors were subdivisions of a county.  Even if the idea is to add manor categories to the people who held them, it is probably incorrect and inappropriate to use the term “Lord of.”

Comments

I tend to agree with this myself, Joe, and thank you for the information.

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I am agreement with Joe. It was not a title, except in so far as the person was in charge of the estate. They may not even have owned it. “The boss man who had the big house who encouraged his tenants to be subservient” doesn’t sound Category material to me.

I will now stand back ready for the fusillades from the Lords of the Manor support groups.

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Fusillades wrapped up in niceties, of course, because this is Wikitree.

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Fusillade coming up!  (though I'd prefer manors to  Lords of the manor as categories and I  agree there would be far too many if created en bloc.  I think they would be best created as and when needed)

I've certainly seen lordships of manors mentioned in wills.  In the 19th C overseers of the poor book for Hazelbury Bryan, 6d, a  token  rent for the parish poor houses is  listed as being  paid annually  to Lord Rivers, Lord of the Manor.  Even though the land in Hazelbury had been sold in small parcels back in the 16th C , the freeholders had rights to pasture cows on the common, These common rights were administrated by a manorial court.   A 16th C chancery suit, concerning the 'inheritance' of  a  copyhold in Fordington  starts by describing that  the Lordship of the Manor was held by the late Queen. Customary tenants  held copyholds from the manorial court. In Fordington, this continued  until the 1870s, and the land was unenclosed  with  blocks of land dotted about the open filed.The manor court still appointed the Reeve and the Hayward. Even now the vestiges aren't completely gone. Fordington annual fair is still held on the green by the  permission of the Duchy.  Much of Fordington great  field  has been turned into HRHs personal experiment in town planning.

Manor court records start by describing whose court it was. I'm sure that this sort of  thing was recited  at the opening of each session.  Here's a couple of examples which use the term Lord of the manor. For ease,  I've used 2 examples from exercises in  Manorial Records ( Denis Stuart) The first is from 1636, the second from 1731.

Visus franc[i] pleg[i]cum Curi[ia] Baron[is] Rad[  ]i Sneyde Ar [migeri] d[ominus] maner[ii] p' dicti (View of the Frankpledge with court baron of Ralph Sneyde Esquire, lord of the aforesaid manor.)

Curia Visus Franci plegii cum Curia Baronis Oswaldi Mosley Ba [onetti]  D[omini] Manerii Predicti   

Regular surveys of manors were also held, the tenants had to present their copies to the surveyor  and they were duly recorded. ( a great for family historians  ) This is  from a translation  of  the survey of Okeford Fitzpaine 1584 (Dorset Record's Society)

"Survey of the manor held, made and examined by diligent and exact inspection, perambulation and examination of the aforesaid manor by Thomas Wrighte,surveyor for Sir Thomas Kitson,Lord of this manor and with the oaths of the whole homage of the manor and the numerous tenants..."

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I don't disagree with what you are saying Helen and I have seen lord of the manor as you suggest.  However, as you say elsewhere, I also see it as profession.  People use Lord of a Manor as a title, which I think is what the real intent of this request is.

I also note that all of your examples are after 1500 (modern in my eyes!).  I am used to seeing and thinking about manors as they are found in IPMs, the patent rolls, the closed rolls etc. pre-1500.  Tracing the inheritance of manors is absolutely key to medieval genealogy.  This is where I see the true value of manors .  I just don't know that it is worth creating thousands of categories, for something which is better done in the biography.

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I'm definitely going to go 'off topic' here.

 I don't disagree on the usage of the 'title'  Lord of the manor,it wasn't an honour  as such. I still wouldn't call it an occupation. I also agree that my examples are from early modern and later history but that's my interest, manors didn't stop at the Battle of Bosworth, as in other posts I mentioned there are vestiges today. I think our local antiquarian did a very good job of recording the descent of the various  manors  and advowsons from medieval times but he didn't mention the husbandmen or the artisans working and living in the manor.   I  would want to record  more ordinary people,  many of  whose  families continue to live in the  same area. I've tried to become familiar with records of some local manors. As a result,  I've been known to shout out when I saw a familiar yet unusual name on the side of a white van and to have quizzed an old man on his ancestry  at a village cricket match.

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I think the idea some of us had in mind, lordship categories, already exists on Wikitree, and has a way forward. Wiki categories are flexible so they do not all be easily linked to a location hierarchy.

I think the idea of studies of tenancies in manors with good records is a very interesting idea. Not sure if categories are a useful tool in most of these cases though. It seems more like studying a house history.

Answer 4

I've been working up to asking for something similar myself. The owners of manors in earlier times had enormous power over their tenantry whatever they were called. It's also true that identifying the people who held a manor can help sort out obscure family relationships. That said I agree it's an enormously complex subject. If it is done then by County is the way to go though I suspect some manors spread across boundaries.

Comments

Yes,  as you can see from my reply above, at heart  I'm more  into the tenantry . If we can access them, manorial records are  really useful for sorting out  relationships of more ordinary folk,especially if there are is  a good sequence of them .

 I think I would prefer a category for manors rather than Lords of the Manor but I suspect that  I that they wouldn't be widely used.

Answer 5

There really are two questions to answer here.

First, is, what is the inquirer trying to accomplish with a "Lord of the Manor" category?  Is the intent really to group profiles for some purpose, or simply to attach a label or sticker to the profile identifying Thomas Acklom as a landownere?  (I personally believe WikiTree categories should have a genealogical purpose, but I think that's a minority view.  Still, there should be some purpose, shouldn't there?)

Second, what would be useful to WikiTree with "this kind of category" and what kind is that?  The automatic assumption is that a manor is a location category, hence if you will have them, it adds to the tangle of sub-county-level categories -- villages, towns, parishes, hundreds, manors -- and people are supposed to be categorized at the lowest level only.  Doing this opens up a can of worms.  There is also a desire that location categories include all locations of a type, so if you're going to do counties, you'll do ALL counties;  if you're going to do towns, you'll do ALL towns.  The value of doing something for ALL manors is tiny compared to the enormous workload involved!

BUT -- I have created a few manor categories in the past for specific genealogical medieval research purposes, because often those associated with a medieval manor are related to each other and it's been very helpful to group them. In parallel, I have created categories for specific land-names in Maryland.  Colonial Maryland legally named its plantations, from the mundane ("Good Will") to the exotic ("Pig's Misery").  As with manors, people associated with a property were often related to each other, so I created these as part of specific genealogical research.  

I have been in conversation lately with those working with enslaved people in US history, who are often known only in connection with the plantations they are associated with, and have proposed that they consider creating categories for these plantations.

In each of these cases -- Manors in England, land in Maryland, plantations with enslaved people -- I think it's critically important to consider these PROPERTY categories, not LOCATION categories, therefore not part of the location category schemes, not under the restriction to go to the lowest level only, etc.  And also to consider them ON DEMAND categories, i.e. create them when needed, with no expectation whatsoever that one needs to have categories for all instances in an area.  

For the most part, whether manor or plantation, these would be what I would call MICRO-CATEGORIES, i.e. generally only expected to have 200 profiles or less, except for some very large southern US plantations.  I personally find categories most useful for research if they are expected to have 50 profiles or less, but again, this is I think a minority view on WikiTree.  But if one only believes in huge categories, then property categories probably don't belong on WikiTree.

Going back now to the original request, I do believe that it could be good --if the researcher wishes -- to have a PROPERTY category for the manors Thomas Acklom was associated with, and I would expect many of the others associated with these manor properties to be related.

Another alternative, going back to the original question, would be to consider "Lords of the Manor" to be not a LOCATION type category, nor a PROPERTY category, but an OCCUPATION category.  "What do you do for a living?"  "I'm Lord of a Manor."  In that case, it might well be a primary occupation for someone living in the 1600s, but only an exotic hobby for someone with the title in 2020.

Comments

Heck, i'm commenting again, I hope, it's not too frequent 

I agree with you that my  immediate thought  was to categorise manors by LOCATION, i.e,  counties and then perhaps  by the parishes they are normally associated with.(a difficulty at times since some straddle parishes)  I still feel that  this is the most sensible way of categorising (this is what the National Archives does in it's register of Manorial records) I agree that classifying any individual  down to the lowest category would not be sensible and it would certainly not be a good idea to  try to add every single possible manor.

 A manor consists of so much land in so and so place. The area is defined by survey.  If you didn't  categorise by location, how on earth would you find Abbotts Street Manor, or Pile Marsh or Antioch manors

Also, by concentrating solely  on the property 'ownership' aspect of manorial tenure we would be doing exactly what the antiquarians of yore did, neglecting the majority of the inhabitants .If I were going to categorise by manor, my interest would be in the villeins who became the copyholders of latter years

 To return to the original question I think that the  Lordship of any particular manor should,  be a sub category of the manor of -----  in ---shire .I'm not sure whether it should be stand alone or then nestled under the appropriate parish(es)

 I wouldn't think  that being a LOM was an occupation the occupation of most  lords of the manor would in earlier years  probably be that  of  estate owner or farmer  but later might be something else, I have in mind  an army  general  and part time archaeologist . It  was an intermittent source of income at best. Many of these  men (and a few women)  also owned the freehold of  what was the original demesne land in several  manors.   The LOM didn't have to spend on land improvements or cottages of his tenants (though some with a social conscience did) They did have to pay 'administrative'  and court costs .They also  had to wait for someone to die off to get their money on transfer  to the next life. These weren't huge amounts, they couldn't be because the tenants weren't that well off. In the late 18th, early 19th C,  the cost of transfer to a new life  of three half places and a farthing hold (say 75 acres) in Fordington was about £100. The lack of return was one of the reasons that LOMs refused to issue new copies,selling the land as freehold land or leasing or renting it to tenants.

There are also other possible sub categories depending on the manor for example  members of the court leet, In several places, these still exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_leet#Courts_leet_existing_today

 (some notes from a presentation about Portland Court Leet by a current member ) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EcTbuEPFmfcJ:www.rotary-ribi.org/clubs/page.php%3FPgID%3D592112%26ClubID%3D1225+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

 I find it very  interesting and  could utilise such categories,  if I only got round to putting more of my personal local history  research onto wikitree. But in the long run, I think  that such categories would be mainly useful to people doing one place studies.

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I think we're still developing a common terminology here.  When I refer to a LOCATION category, I'm referring to a set of categories that we've now developed in a very formal way on WikiTree, which have an agreed upon structure, each category has a specific CIB (Category Information Box) on it,  all instances of a category must be created, i.e. if you're doing counties, you must do ALL counties of a country,  and only the lowest level category is to be used for profiles.  So the minute you talk about creating another level of location category you're talking about a huge project.

Of course, anything else can be categorized by location.  Cemeteries, for instance are categorized by location, but they are cemetery categories, not location categories.  So a manor in a specific area would fall into a particular location, and could be categorized as part of that location.  But the minute you call it a location category, then as I understand it you wold have to create categories for all the manors in a specific county.  Tremendous work has gone into creating location categories for England, and it's very well organized, anything I think anything which appears to propose messing with what's already there will go nowhere!