Reference
Guide to Manorial History
Reference articles on the structures, sources, and terminology of English manorial history. These are general introductions, not specific to any single manor. For individual manorial descents, see the manor profiles.
What is a manor?
The manor as a unit of landholding, administration, and jurisdiction from Domesday to the present day.
Lord of the manor
What the title means, how it was acquired and transferred, and what survives of it today.
Domesday Book
The great survey of 1086: what it recorded, how it was compiled, and what it tells us about manorial tenure.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries
How the Dissolution of 1536 to 1541 transformed manorial ownership across England.
Castle serjeanty
The obligation to defend a royal castle in return for holding land, and how it shaped the Portsdown manors.
The Manorial Documents Register
The National Archives index of surviving manorial documents: court rolls, surveys, maps, and extents.
The Victoria County History
The principal published authority for English local history, and the foundation of our research programme.
Hundreds and rapes
The administrative districts that organised medieval England, from the hundred court to the Sussex rapes.
Copyhold tenure
Tenure by copy of the court roll: what copyhold was, how it worked, and how the Law of Property Act 1922 abolished it.
Inquisitions Post Mortem
Crown inquiries into the lands of deceased tenants: what they recorded, why they matter, and how to use the published calendars.
The manorial court
Court baron, court leet, and view of frankpledge: the courts that governed manorial life and the records they produced.
Advowsons
The right to appoint a parish priest, and how advowsons were held, traded, and connected to manorial lordship.
Knight service
The military obligation at the heart of the feudal system: the knight's fee, scutage, and the Tenures Abolition Act 1660.
Enclosure
How open fields and common land became private property, and what enclosure meant for the manorial system.
Feet of Fines
The legal fiction used to transfer property from the twelfth to the nineteenth century, and the records it left behind.
Domesday terminology
Hides, carucates, villeins, bordars, demesne, and TRE: a reference guide to the language of the Domesday survey.