,
Kent, built in the mid 14th century. A manor house hall was where the lord and his family ate, received guests, and conferred with dependents. The word derives from traditional inherited divisions of the countryside, reassigned as local jurisdictions known as
manors or
seigneuries; each manor being subject to a
lord (French
seigneur), usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a higher lord (see
Feudalism). The lord held a
manorial court, governed by public law and local custom. Not all territorial seigneurs were secular;
bishops and
abbots also held lands that entailed similar obligations. By extension, the word
manor is sometimes used in England as a slang term for any home area or territory in which authority is held, often in a police or criminal context. In the generic plan of a medieval manor from ''Shepherd's Historical Atlas'', the strips of individually worked land in the open field system are immediately apparent. In this plan, the manor house is set slightly apart from the village, but equally often the village grew up around the
forecourt of the manor, formerly walled, while the manor lands stretched away outside, as still may be seen at
Petworth House. As concerns for privacy increased in the 18th century, manor houses were often located a farther distance from the village. For example, when a grand new house was required by the new owner of
Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire, in the 1830s, the site of the existing manor house at the edge of its village was abandoned for a new one, isolated in its park, with the village out of view. In an agrarian society, the conditions of land tenure underlie all social or economic factors. There were two legal systems of pre-manorial landholding. One, the most common, was the system of holding land
"allodially" in full outright ownership. The other was a use of
precaria or
benefices, in which land was held conditionally (the root of the English word "precarious"). To these two systems, the Carolingian monarchs added a third, the
aprisio, which linked manorialism with
feudalism. The
aprisio made its first appearance in
Charlemagne's province of
Septimania in the south of
France, when Charlemagne had to settle the
Visigothic refugees who had fled with his retreating forces after the failure of his
Zaragoza expedition of 778. He solved this problem by allotting "desert" tracts of uncultivated land belonging to the royal
fisc under direct control of the emperor. These holdings
aprisio entailed specific conditions. The earliest specific
aprisio grant that has been identified was at
Fontjoncouse, near
Narbonne (see Lewis, links). In former Roman settlements, a system of
villas, dating from Late Antiquity, was inherited by the medieval world.
The seigneur The possessor of a seigneurie bears the title of "
Lord". He can be an individual, in the vast majority of cases a national of the
nobility or of the
Bourgeoisie, but also a
judicial person most often an ecclesiastical institution such as an
abbey, a
cathedral or canonical chapter or a military order. The power of the lord was exercised through various intermediaries, the most important of which was the
bailiff. The sovereign can also be a lord; the seigneuries he owns form the royal domain. The title of lord is also granted, especially in modern times, to individuals holding noble fiefdoms which are not for all that seigneuries. These "lords" are sometimes called sieurs, equivalent terms in medieval times.
The land lordship The lord is the direct or prominent owner of the land assets of his lordship. The notion of absolute ownership over a common good cannot be applied, because there are also others than the main user who have rights over these goods. For example, in England, all
allodial ownership of the land was by the monarch; some of that land was granted to and held by
feudal barons with direct
fealty or
homage to the monarch. Feudal barons were usually direct
tenants-in-chief who then granted
land tenure to multiple vassals to work the land. Sometimes
tenants in chief could be directly beholden to the monarch. Details and names varied, depending on the period and area of Europe, i.e. England versus Prussia or France. Monarchs (or feudal barons with vassals) set the reserves which were split between the set of goods of which the land lord reserved the direct exploitation and
tenant-in-chief, property whose exploitation is entrusted to a vassal against payment of a royalty, most often called cens and services such as
Corvée. The distribution between reserve and tenure varied depending on the period and region. ==Common features==