Manorial Court Rolls Research Articles

Servile Migration and Gender in Late Medieval England: The Evidence of Manorial Court Rolls

Abstract Migration in medieval England was substantial, essential and mainly over short distances. Beyond this confident generalization, we know little about either the direction, life-histories or gendered patterns of rural migrants, and have no quantitative data. Yet, despite this, assumptions about peasant migration comprise central elements in two major debates about differential trajectories of social change in late-medieval Europe. The decline of serfdom and the emergence of the European Marriage Pattern in parts of northwest Europe — and by extension its superior economic performance to other regions of the Continent in the age of the Black Death — are attributed mainly to the preference of serfs and rural women to migrate disproportionately to towns. This article uses the most abundant and unambiguous source of peasant migration — the record of flown serfs in English manorial court rolls — to provide the first quantitative dataset for the proportion of serfs and women moving to towns. It also reassesses the importance of circular migration through qualitative life-histories. Hitherto, no comparable rural material from medieval Europe has been published. It argues that historians have under-utilized this material because of ill-founded doubts about its reliability and quality, while remaining cautious about its typicality. It deploys information gleaned from thousands of court rolls for twenty-six manors across Midland and eastern England to reveal that 33 per cent of serfs headed for towns, and explores subtle differences in regional and gendered patterns of migration. The implications of the findings for the wider debates are discussed.

Etude on Comparative Source Studies: Example of Medieval English Manor

The paper offers a number of problems connected with specificity and comparative characteristics of manorial records — surveys and court rolls of medieval England. Manorial surveys as a basic type of records include various data concerning lands, tenements, and rents of English peasants, entry fines, heriots, enclosures, different social types of peasantry, etc. A number of them have been thoroughly researched by Russian historians, while manorial court rolls haven’t been yet researched enough. Manorial court rolls if compared with manorial surveys, are sources of another type. They represent everyday life of English medieval peasantry, including its legal aspects as well as crucial role of manorial custom in the relations between peasants and manorial lords; order of manorial courts’ work and their types; crimes and punishments in the manors; borrowings from the system of Common law (e.g. the Jury), etc. Manorial court rolls have been substantially researched in England and in the USA by both historians and legal scholars. This article also deals with the problem of interpretation of numeric and legal “languages” of manorial records.

Mapping peasant discontent: trespassing on manorial land in fourteenth-century Walsham-le-Willows

ABSTRACTIn recent years, it has largely been the domain of the landscape archaeologist to uncover and analyse the physical terrain of the late medieval manor. This has provided much material for the examination of ideas of rural power, control and social organisation. Considering the morphology of the settlement and adjacent fieldscape, it is rare, however, to reflect upon the views of the peasantry, who would after all have made up the majority of the population of rural communities. Using evidence gathered from fourteenth-century manorial court rolls, this study examines peasant attitudes to the rural landscape from an historical perspective through the analysis of incidences of trespass on demesne and peasant land in the Suffolk vill of Walsham-le-Willows. Unusually, these documentary sources frequently make reference to the specific location of peasant trespass allowing for a quantitative investigation that reveals something of the motivation behind these seemingly petty and notionally accidental incidents. Traditionally, cases of trespassing on neighbouring land have been considered only fleetingly by historians, since it is generally believed that many incidents were the result of accidental damage by wandering livestock, or that manorial officials used court fines as a means of licensing access. This study shows that the reality was far more complex, and that there was a range of motivational stimuli for these acts.

A Mute Gospel. The People and Culture of the Medieval English Common Fields. By Sherri Olson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2009. 242 pp. $75.00)

Studies of cultural, and to a certain extent, social history often tend to carry subjective character, resulting in subjective interpretations. The current study by Sherri Olson, dealing with the cultural life of two late-medieval parishes in Huntingdonshire, is one such recent example. In her monograph, Olson aims to “gain a more balanced view of medieval society by considering how peasants thought about themselves and their world as revealed in English manorial court rolls.” In a lengthy introduction (pp. 1–49), Olson exposes her methodology, key-questions, and concepts that serve her in her study of late-medieval village culture. In Chapter One (pp. 52–91), the author speaks of “ritual” and “performance” at local manorial courts, which turned into a “theatric arena”, during sessions. Chapter Two (pp. 92–123) deals with (mostly sur-)names, with a particular attention to women's surnames and the relation of the latter to the social status of their bearers. Olson concludes that surnames tended to be dynamic, changing over and sometimes within generations. In Chapter Three (pp. 124–148), Olson considers “pragmatic literacy” of Huntingdonshire peasants, their access to and reliance on contemporary Latin documents, which provided safeguards of their personal status. In Chapter Four (pp. 149–177), the author studies the history of trespasses (transgressiones, in Latin) from the late thirteenth until the late fourteenth centuries, showing dynamics of their nature and meaning and concluding that in the post-Black Death period, there was an increasing number of trespasses not only on the demesne, but also within the tenancy. In Chapter Five (pp. 178–200), Olson surveys the shift in naming landscape elements (fields, crofts, etc.), after the Black Death. She argues that after the pestilence, more and more villagers assigned their own surnames to the landscapes. In the conclusion (pp. 201–6), Olson reminds the reader that it is impossible to understand medieval peasants, unless we understand how they thought and acted.

ANNE REIBER DEWINDT, EDWIN BREZETTE DEWINDT. Ramsey: The Lives of an English Fenland Town, 1200-1600. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 455. With CD-ROM. $79.95

The small Huntingdonshire town of Ramsey must surely be one of the very best documented medieval English communities, and its status as an abbey-town that remained unincorporated even after the Dissolution makes it an obvious exemplar of a very common urban type. Both authors' long-standing association with the book's particular methodology, and their many years of work on the extensive documentation of the Ramsey Abbey estates, lend Anne Reiber DeWindt and Edwin Brezette DeWindt's book the air of a valedictory for the Raftis school of English medieval social history (the approach established by Fr. Ambrose Raftis at Toronto's Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in the 1960s). Based initially on the rich survival of manorial court rolls and similar documents pertaining to the Ramsey Abbey estates, this long-term research venture produced a number of finely detailed and path-breaking studies of medieval manorial and small town governance and society. Taken together, they demonstrated the effective use of manorial records at the micro level, vastly enhancing our understanding of that fundamental medieval English milieu as they did so.

Social control and the hue and cry in two fourteenth-century villages

This paper seeks to explore aspects of peasant community policing and keeping order in two fourteenth-century villages. The raising of the hue and cry was not only an important tool for policing local communities, it was also a communal ritual. The cases which caused the hue and cry to be raised, and which were then recorded in the manorial court rolls, can reveal a great deal about peasant attitudes to different types of offending behaviour, as well as local mechanisms of social control. At the same time such cases can be explored for peasant attitudes to gender, gender roles as well as peasant attitudes to seigniorial authority. Discrepancies in offending behaviour between men and women can be evaluated and compared between two manorial communities. Similarly peasant communities appear to have applied some degree of discretion in their dealing with particular offences, by, for instance, not drawing attention to some of them by raising the hue and cry. These issues allow us important insights into peasant mentalities and attitudes to order, disorder, gender and seigniorial authority.

The land market of a Pennine manor: Slaidburn, 1650–1780

The quantitative study of English land markets in the three centuries after the close of the middle ages is still in its infancy. The medievalists, exploiting the conveyances of customary tenants recorded in manorial court rolls, have shown how issues such as the devolution of land within families, the frequency with which land was sold and the behaviour of the land market at moments of demographic or economic stress can be addressed by the analysis of such data either aggregatively or by looking at the landholding histories of individual participants in the land market. Early modernists have invariably approached the study of the land market in a non-quantitative fashion, usually as part of an attempt to make observations about some other characteristic of English history. Stone looked at the land market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as part of his campaign to prove that the aristocracy was in decline, Macfarlane to show that the property-holding behaviour of the English was ‘individualistic’, Habbakuk to explore the strategies by which the English aristocracy maintained its supremacy and Mingay and others to settle the debate about the effect of enclosure on the small landowner. The early modern land market has rarely, if ever, been seen as worthy of discussion in its own right.

Medieval Society and the Manor Court

The records of manorial courts have been used increasingly as the principal source for the reconstruction of rural and small town society in Medieval England. They offer a unique source with which to investigate peasant demography, family patterns, the village community and economy, the characteristics and instruments of customary law and the ways in which that law was perceived and exploited by landlords and tenants. The essays in this collection provide novel approaches to all of these themes and are written by many of the historians who have pioneered the use of this source category in the last two decades. In two introductory chapters, the editors review the historiography of manorial court rolls and account for their origins as a distinctive record of customary law within the broad context of medieval European society. A valuable appendix contains an inventory of the most comprehensive manorial court roll series arranged systematically on a county-to-county basis, detailing the repository in which they are located. This book will serve as an essential reference tool for any serious study of medieval English rural society.

Manorial court rolls and local population: an East Anglian case study

The value of manorial court rolls as a source of demographic data in medieval England is examined using the example of the Norfolk manor of Gressenhall. The results suggest that sources of this nature providing they are of high quality can provide crude but reliable data for estimating population size. (ANNOTATION)

Some recent research in medieval manorial court rolls: Implications for archivists

Some recent research in medieval manorial court rolls: Implications for archivists

The Demographic Transparency of Manorial Court Rolls

All historical sources reflect reality in a partial and distorted way. The past, therefore, can be understood only when the limitations of particular sources are recognized and the methods employed in making historical observations, as well as the observations themselves, are constantly tested and refined. Drs. Poos and Smith, in an earlier issue of the Law and History Review, have undertaken such a task when they thoroughly examined my use of manorial court rolls' data for demographic analysis of a medieval English parish.

The Use of Manorial Court Rolls in Demographic Analysis: A Reconsideration

Drs. L.R. Poos and R.M. Smith have strongly criticized the uses made of manorial court rolls for demographic analysis. They have argued that the data obtained from the court records are inadequate in measuring the demographic trend and in making observations about replacement rates, expectation of life, marriage and illegitimacy. It seems to me, however, that although their criticism is partly justified, on the whole it is unduly negative. First, the claim that the demographic trend cannot be measured from court rolls will be examined; and thereafter the other issues raised by Poos and Smith will be discussed.

Social Structures in Five East Midland Villages.

S ocial and economic historians have long pondered with F. W. Maitland the question of 'how best to garner the great mass of information contained in the manorial rolls'. No less attractive to other disciplines would be Maitland's recommendation for the students of legal history: 'In the first place it would be well to pick out a few selected manors, to select them because they have unusually complete and continuous records, and then to print those records in full.' 1 But the limited resources of the medievalist that precluded this 'first' approach in the late nineteenth century are no more adequate to the task today. A glance through serial publications 2 reveals that the compromise of Maitland, to print selections from these records, has remained the main method of scholarly production. Indeed, over the past generation there has even been a falling off in this regard. In a recent study 3 based upon court rolls the present writer was able to isolate more clearly the hereditary nature of customary tenancy and the 'regular' features of village mobility. While such features of village life are not unknown to the historian, there did emerge the fascinating possibility of organized research into the life of the villager who has hitherto remained the anonymous, voiceless object of studies in medieval society. Once the court roll is approached as more than a haphazard collection of evidence, and rather as an institution that recorded the work now done by a half-dozen social agencies, the court roll becomes potentially the greatest source for information upon medieval social life. For the greater part of this life was lived in villages, and village court rolls for medieval England are extant by the thousands. If the scores of volumes required to print the court rolls from merely one group of manors precludes Maitland's first approach, the vast amount of data in these volumes does attract the methods increasingly employed by the social scientist in the twentieth century. For these data approximate in magnitude resource material now more usual to the social survey. The following study is a survey intended to illustrate the data available in manorial court rolls and at least one method for the extraction of this material. For this survey there has been chosen the very detailed rolls of Ramsey villages for a six-decade period from the time these rolls became

The Writing of History Text-books for Africa

There is one great disadvantage that the history teacher must feel in drawing up a syllabus of history for African schools. It is accepted now that young children should begin their study of history by learning about their own home district; and at this stage, history and geography should hardly be separated. It is common to find quite young children in elementary schools in Europe putting together little co-operative booklets about the history and geography of their own home; and even in out-of-the-way country districts there are usually enough historical traditions for the purpose. Market charters, manorial court rolls, perhaps a battle-field, or monastic ruins, or a great historic local family—this is material which has reference to places and buildings that the children know well, and which yet leads up easily to the history of a wider area.