(iv) Three free men and their mother held 30 acres for a manor. There was half a team. Value, 5s.[502]
(v) In Rincham a free man held 30 acres for a manor. There were half a team and one acre of meadow. Value, 5s.[503]
(vi) In Wenham Ælfgar a free man held 24 acres for a manor. Value, 4s.[504]
(vii) In Torp a free man held 20 acres for a manor. One team; wood for 5 pigs. Value, 40d.[505]
(viii) In Tudenham Ælfric the deacon, a free man, held 12 acres for a manor. One team, 3 bordiers, 2 acres of meadow, 1 rouncey, 2 beasts that do not plough, 11 pigs, 40 sheep. Value, 3s.[506]
We are not speaking of curiosities; the sixty acre manor was very common in Essex, the thirty acre manor was no rarity in Suffolk.
The manor as a peasant’s holding.
Now it is plain enough that the ‘lord’ of such a manor,—or rather the holder of such a manor, for there was little lordship in the case,—was often enough a peasant, a tiller of the soil. He was under soke and under commendation; commended it may be to one lord, rendering soke to another. Sometimes he is called a sokeman[507]. But he has a manor. Sometimes he has a full team, sometimes but half a team. Sometimes he has a couple of bordiers seated on his land, who help him in his husbandry. Sometimes there is no trace of tenants, and his holding is by no means too large to permit of his cultivating it by his own labour and that of his sons. No doubt in the west country even before the Conquest these petty mansiones or maneria were being accumulated in the hands of the wealthy. The thegn who was the antecessor of the Norman baron, sometimes held a group, a geographically discontinuous group, of petty manors as well as some more substantial and better consolidated estates. But still each little holding is reckoned a manor, while in the east of England there is nothing to show that the nameless free men who held the manors which are said to consist of 60, 40, 30 acres had usually more than one manor apiece. When therefore we are told that already before the Conquest England was full of manors, we must reply: Yes, but of what manors[508]
Definition of a manor.
Now were the differences between various manors a mere difference in size and in value, a student of law might pass them by. Our notion of ownership is the same whether it be applied to the largest and most precious, or to the smallest and most worthless of things. But in this case we have not to deal with mere differences in size or value. The examples that we have given will have proved that few, if any, propositions of legal import will hold good of all maneria. We must expressly reject some suggestions that the later history of our law may make to us. ‘A manor has a court of its own’:—this is plainly untrue. To say nothing of extreme cases, of the smallest of the manors that we have noticed, we can not easily believe that a manor with less than ten tenants has a court of its own, yet the number of such manors is exceedingly large. ‘A manor has freehold tenants’:—this of course we must deny, unless we hold that the villani are freeholders. ‘A manor has villein or customary tenants’:—even this proposition, though true of many cases, we can not accept. Not only may we find a manor the only tenants upon which are liberi homines[509], but we are compelled to protest that a manor need not have any tenants at all. ‘A manor must contain demesne land’:—this again we can not believe. In one case we read that the whole manor is being farmed by the villeins so that there is nothing in demesne[510], while in other cases we are told that there is nothing in demesne and see no trace of any recent change[511]. Thus, one after another, all the familiar propositions seem to fail us, and yet we have seen good reason to believe that manerium has some exact meaning. It remains that we should hazard an explanation.