Manorial Custom and Its Role in the World of English Copyhold

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of manorial custom and its role in the life of peasant world of medieval England. Manorial custom is defined as a legal phenomenon of local significance, as its socio-economic, legal and moral public norm, balancing thepowerful will of manorial lord. Peculiar regulative features of manorial custom revealed themselves in the sphere of socio-economic development and manorial jurisdiction of customary courts, in the rules of inheritance and women’s property rights including widow law, in compliance with behavioral norms. Manorial custom was based on such criteria as antiquity of legal rules, reasonableness (its correlation with everyday life and manorial economic development), permanence and continuity of reliance on the custom (its frequent usage). Historical destiny of manorial custom revealed itself in the process of coercive deformation by the powerful lord’s will, constantly growing in its significance in the period of agrarian revolution because of the market conjuncture’s changing. Its role had been gradually decreasing, and this fact (together with other circumstances) partly brought to mass expropriation of English peasantry in the period of parliamentary enclosures of 18th century.