(b) The economic fabric of the French seigneurie varied greatly, according to localities. In the north of France it was not unlike that of the English manor. The capital messuage, or castle, and the home-farm of the lord, were surrounded by dependent holdings, censives, paying rent, and villein tenements burdened with services. Between these tenancies there were various ties of neighbourhood and economic solidarity recalling the open-field cultivation in England and Germany. When the harvest was removed from the open strips they returned to a state of undivided pasture in which the householders of the village exercised rights of common with their cattle. Wild pasture and woods were used more or less in the same fashion as in England (droit de pacage de vaine pâture). The inhabitants often formed courts and held meetings in order to settle the by-laws, and to adjudicate as to trespasses and encroachments (courts colongères). In the south, individual property was more prevalent and the villagers were not so closely united by ties of neighbourhood. Yet even there the dependent households were arranged into mansi or colonicae, subjected to approximately equal impositions in respect of rents and services. In any case the characteristic dualism of manorial life, the combined working of a central home-farm, and of its economic satellites providing necessary help in the way of services, and contributing towards the formation of manorial stores, is quite as much a feature of French as of English medieval husbandry.

(c) The social relations between the manorial lord and his subjects are marked by various forms of the exploitation of the latter by the former. Apart from jurisdictional profits, rents and agricultural services, dues of all kinds are exacted from the rural population. Some of these dues have to be traced to servile origins, although they were evidently gradually extended to groups of people who were not descended from downright serfs but had lapsed into a state of considerable subjection. The main morte of rustic tenants meant that they had no goods of their own, but held movable property on sufferance without the right of passing it on to their successors. As a matter of fact, sons were admitted to inheritance after their fathers, and sometimes succession was extended to other relatives, but the person taking inheritance paid a heavy fine for entering into possession, or gave up a horse, an ox, or some other especially valuable piece of property. The formariage corresponded to the English merchetum, and was exacted from rustics on the marriage of their daughters. Although this payment assumed very different shapes, and sometimes only appeared in case consorts belonged to different lords, it was considered a badge of serfdom. Chevage (capitagium) might be exacted as a poll-tax from all the unfree inhabitants of a seigneurie, or, more especially, from those who left it to look for sustenance abroad. The power of the lord as a landowner was more particularly expressed in his right of pre-emption (retrait seigneurial), and in taxes on alienation (lods et ventes). As a person wielding political authority, a kind of sovereignty, the lord enjoyed divers rights which are commonly attributed to the state—the right of coining money, of levying direct taxes and toll (tallagium, tolneta) and of instituting monopolies. These latter were of common occurrence, and might take the shape, for instance, of forcing the inhabitants to make use of the lord’s mill (moulin banal), or of his oven (four banal), or of his bull (taureau banal).

In Germany the history of the manorial system is bound up with the evolution of the Grundherrschaft (landlordship) as opposed to Gutsherrschaft (estate-ownership). The latter need not include any elements of public authority and aristocratic supremacy: the former is necessarily connected with public functions and aristocratic standing. The centre of the Grundherrschaft was the Hof, the court or hall of the lord, from which the political and economic rights of the lord radiated. The struggle of the military aristocracy and of ecclesiastical institutions with common freedom was more protracted than in France or England; the lordships very often took the shape of disparate rights over holdings and groups of population scattered over wide tracts of country and intermixed with estates and inhabitants subjected to entirely different authority. Therefore the aspect of German manorialism is more confused and heterogeneous than that of the French or English systems. One remarkable feature of it is the consistent separation of criminal justice from other kinds of jurisdiction on Church property. Episcopal sees and abbeys delegated their share of criminal justice to lay magnates in the neighbourhood (Vogtei), and this division of power became a source of various conflicts and of many entangled relations. The main lines of German manorialism are not radically different from those of France and England. The communal element, the Dorfverband, is usually more strongly developed than in France, and assumes a form more akin to the English township. But there were regions, e.g. Westphalia, where the population had settled in separate farms (Hofsystem), and where the communal solidarity was reduced to a union for administrative purposes and for the use of pasture.

It need hardly be added that every step in the direction of more active economic intercourse and more efficient public authority tended to lessen the influence of the manorial system in so far as the latter was based on the localization of government, natural husbandry and aristocratic authority.

See Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions de la France, especially the volumes “L’Alleu et le domaine rural” and “L’Invasion germanique”; Beaudouin, “Les Grands domaines dans l’empire romain” (Nouvelle revue de droit français et étranger, 1898); T. Flach, Les Origines de l’ancienne France, I., II., III. (1886); Paul Viollet, Histoire des institutions de la France, I., II. (1890, 1898); A. Luchaire, Manuel des institutions françaises (1892); G. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, I.-VIII. (1865-1883); K. T. von Inama-Sternegg, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte, I., II. (1879-1891); K. Lamprecht, Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben, I.-IV. (1885); A. Meitzen, Ansiedelungen, Wanderungen und Agrarwesen der Völker Europas, I.-IV. (1895 ff.); W. Wittich, Die Grundherrschaft in Nordwestdeutschland (1896); G. F. von Maurer, Geschichte der Mark-, Dorf- und Hofverfassung in Deutschland; and F. Seebohm, The English Village Community (1883).

(P. Vi.)

The Manor in England.—It will be most convenient to describe a typical English manor in its best known period, the 13th century, and to indicate briefly the modifications of the type which varying conditions may produce. Topographically such a manor consisted partly of the houses of the inhabitants more or less closely clustered together, and surrounded by arable land divided into large fields, two or three in number. Each of these fields was divided again into shots or furlongs, and each of the shots was broken up into cultivated strips a pole wide, each containing an acre, separated by narrow balks of turf. There were also certain meadows for supplying hay; and beyond the cultivated land lay the wood and waste of the manor. Portions of arable or meadow land might be found apart from the organization of the remainder; the lord of the manor might have a park, and each householder a garden, but the land of the manor was the open fields, the meadows and the wastes or common. The condition of the inhabitants of such a manor is as complex as its geography. At the head of the society came the lord of Rights of Lord and Tenants. the manor, with his hall, court, or manor-house, and the land immediately about it, and his demesne both in the fields and in the meadow land. The arable demesne consisted of certain of the acre strips lying scattered over the various furlongs; his meadow was a portion assigned to him each year by the custom of the manor. He had also rights over the surrounding waste paramount to those enjoyed by the other inhabitants. Part of his demesne land would be granted out to free tenants to hold at a rent or by military or other service; part would be in the lord’s own hands, and cultivated by him. Each part so granted out will carry with it a share in the meadow land and in the profits of the waste. These rights of the free tenants over the waste limited the lord’s power over it. He could not by enclosure diminish their interest in it. The statute of Merton in 1236 and the second statute of Westminster in 1285 marked the utmost limit of enclosure allowed in the 13th century. Below the lord and the free tenants came the villeins, natives, bondmen, or holders of virgates or yard-lands, each holding a house, a fixed number of acre strips, a share of the meadow and of the profits of the waste. The number of strips so held was usually about thirty; but virgates of fifteen acres or even eighty are not unknown. In any one manor, however, the holdings of all the villeins were equal. Rights of Villeins. Normally the holder of a virgate was unfree; he had no rights in the eye of the law against his lord, who was protected from all suits by the exceptio villenagii; he could not without leave quit the manor, and could be reclaimed by process of law if he did; the strict contention of law deprived him of all right to hold property; and in many cases he was subject to certain degrading incidents, such as merchet (merchetum), a payment due to the lord upon the marriage of a daughter, which was regarded as a special mark of unfree condition. But there are certain limitations to be made. Firstly, all these incidents of tenure, even merchet, might not affect the personal status of the tenant; he might still be free, though holding by an unfree tenure; secondly, even if unfree, he was not exposed to the arbitrary will of his lord but was protected by the custom of the manor as interpreted by the manor court. Moreover, he was not a slave, he was not bought and sold apart from his holding. The hardship of his condition lay in the services due from him. As a rule a villein paid for his holding in money, in labour and in kind. In money he paid, firstly, a small fixed rent called rent of assize; and, secondly, dues under various names, partly in lieu of services commuted into money payments, and partly for the privileges and profits enjoyed by him on the waste of the manor. In labour he paid more heavily. Week by week he had to come with his own plough and oxen to plough the lord’s demesne; when ploughing was done he had to harrow, to reap the crops, to thresh and carry them, or do whatever might be required of him, until his allotted number of days labour in the year was done. Beyond this his lord might request of him extra days in harvest or other seasons of emergency, and these requests could not be denied. Further, all the carriage of the manor was provided by the villeins, even to places as much as a hundred miles away from the manor. The mending of the ploughs, hedging, ditching, sheepshearing and other miscellaneous work also fell upon him, and it is sometimes hard to see what time remained to him to work upon his own holding. In kind he usually rendered honey, eggs, chickens and perhaps a ploughshare, but these payments were almost always small in value. Another class of inhabitants remains to be mentioned—the Cotters. cotters. These are the poor of the manor, who hold a cottage and garden, or perhaps one acre or half an acre in the fields. They were unfree in condition, and in most manors their services were modelled upon those of the villeins. From their ranks were usually drawn the shepherd of the manor, the bee-keeper and other minor officials of the manor.

A complicated organization necessarily involves administrators. Just as the services of the tenants and even their names vary from manor to manor, so does the nature of the staff. Highest in rank came the steward; he was attached to no manor in particular, but controlled a group, travelling from one to another to take accounts, to hold the courts, and generally Staff. represent the lord. Under him are the officers of the several manors. First came the bailiff or beadle, the representative of the lord in the manor; his duty was to collect the rents and services, to gather in the lord’s crops and account for the receipts and expenditure of the manor. Closely connected with him was the “messor” or reaper; in many cases, indeed, “reaper” seems to have been only another name for the bailiff. But the villeins were not without their own officer, the provost or reeve. His duty was to arrange the distribution of the services due from the tenants, and, as their representative, to assist the bailiff in the management of the manor. Sometimes the same man appears to have united both offices, and we find the reeve accounting to the lord for the issues of the manor. To these important officials may be added a number of smaller ones, the shepherd, the swineherd, the bee-keeper, the cowherd, the ploughman and so on, mostly selected from the cotters, and occupying their small holdings by the services expressed in their titles. The number varies with the constitution and needs of each estate, and they are often replaced by hired labour.

The most complicated structure in the system is the manor court. The complication is, indeed, partly the work of lawyers interpreting institutions they did not understand by formulae not adapted to describe them. But beyond Manor Court. this there remain the facts that the court was the meeting-point of the lord and the tenants both free and unfree, that any question touching on the power and constitution of the court was bound to affect the interests of the lord and the tenants, and that there was no external power capable of settling such questions as did arise. Amid this maze a few clear lines can be laid down. In the first place, so far as the 13th century goes, all the discussion that has collected about the terms court leet, court baron and court customary may be put aside; it relates to questions which in the 13th century were only just emerging. The manor court at that date exercised its criminal, civil, or manorial jurisdiction as one court; its names may differ, the parties before it may be free or unfree, but the court is the same. Its president was the lord’s steward; the bailiff was the lord’s representative and the public prosecutor; and the tenants of the manor, both free and unfree, attended at the court and gave judgment in the cases brought before it. To modern ears the constitution sounds unfamiliar. The president of the court settled the procedure of the court, carried it out, and gave the final sentence, but over the law of the court he had no power. All that is comprised in the word “judgment” was settled by the body of tenants present at the court. This attendance was, indeed, compulsory, and absence subjected to a fine any tenant owing and refusing the service known as “suit of court.” It may be asked who in these courts settled questions of fact. The answer must be that disputed questions of fact could only be settled in one way, by ordeal; and that in most manorial courts the method employed was the wager of law. The business of the court may be divided into criminal, manorial and civil. Its powers under the first head depended on the franchises enjoyed by the lord in the particular manor; for the most part only petty offences were triable, such as small thefts, breaches of the assize of bread and ale, assaults, and the like; except under special conditions, the justice of great offences remained in the king. But offences against the custom of the manor, such as bad ploughing, improper taking of wood from the lord’s woods, and the like, were of course the staple criminal business of the court. Under the head of manorial business the court dealt with the choice of the manorial officers, and had some power of making regulations for the management of the manor; but its most important function was the recording of the surrenders and admittances of the villein tenants. Into the history and meaning of this form of land transfer it is not necessary to enter here. But it must be noted that the conveyance of a villein’s holding was effected by the vendor surrendering his land to the lord, who thereupon admitted the purchaser to the holding. The same procedure was employed in all cases of transfer of land, and the transaction was regularly recorded upon the rolls of the court among the records of all the other business transacted there. Finally, the court dealt with all suits as to land within the manor, questions of dower and inheritance, and with civil suits not connected with land. But it need hardly be said that in an ordinary rural manor very few of these would occur.

It will be clear on consideration that the manor court as here described consisted of conflicting elements of very different origin and history. Founded partly on express grants of franchises, partly on the inherent right of a feudal lord to hold a court for his free tenants, partly on the obscure community traceable among the unfree inhabitants of the manor, it is incapable of strict legal definition. All these elements, moreover, contain in themselves reasons for the decay which gradually came over the system. The history of the decay of the manorial jurisdictions in England has not yet been written. On the one hand were the king’s courts, with new and improved processes of law; on the other hand the gradual disintegration which marks the history of the manor during the 14th and 15th centuries. The criminal jurisdiction was the first to disappear, and was closely followed by the civil jurisdiction over the free tenants; and in modern times all that is left is the jurisdiction over the customary tenants and their holdings, and that in an attenuated form.