Manorial Documents Register Project

Blog One: Everyday life in a Northumberland Manor.

by

This is the first in a series of blogs written by Peter Atkin, our placement student from Strathclyde University. Peter has been researching our manorial records and using our new online resources to learn about Northumbrian manors (https://northumberlandarchives.com/manorial-project/). Keep an eye on this blog for future posts on his findings!

(A postcard of Norham Manor and Norham Castle (which was itself a manor) on the Scottish Borders)

When approaching the manorial documents housed by Northumberland Archive, it can at first seem quite daunting. Thousands of court rolls and as many of the similarly named, but historically very different call rolls, can keep you reading well past your bedtime without feeling like you’ve found anything of use at all. At least that’s how I felt, as a history student on a work placement with the Everyday life in a Northumberland Manor Project. But once the nerves settle and you begin to break these documents into chunks, it becomes a fascinating peephole into, well, everyday life in a Northumberland manor.

Tasked with producing a couple of blogs in my eight weeks placement and armed with two friendly and welcoming advisors, I spent the first two weeks simply sifting through the paperwork. The aim of this project is to highlight the vast amounts of manorial documents in Northumberland, which I can now attest to, as well as the uses which they can be put to. (Additionally, the Manorial Documents Register (MDR) also offers an index of all the manorial documents in England and Wales –https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/finding-records-in-discovery-and-other-databases/manorial-documents-register) From my early experiences, an important aspect of such documents is showing us the parts of history which are less often given the limelight. When one visits the magnificent Alnwick Castle, the lives of the Percy family and their role throughout British history are easy to learn and imagine. The roles of their servants and subjects, essentially the position most people found themselves in, is less accessible. Manorial documents can help us rectify this. They give us an interesting insight into the way in which authority was shared at a local level, with the perhaps unexpected revelation that many people were involved quite directly in the upkeep of their manorial customs. While those free tenants who were chosen as jurors for the courts were not the lowest class of medieval and early modern society, their role in the justice system is interesting nonetheless.

(Example of a manor court roll from Tweedmouth and Spittle, interestingly referred to as ‘in the county palatine of Durham’ despite the modern Tweedmouth being in Northumberland)

Manor court rolls, the transcription of events at the manorial courts which are held once or twice annually, describe the crimes and punishments which were occurring in different parts of Northumberland. It is perhaps important to note here that ‘manors’ didn’t necessarily have a house, and the term in fact refers to the area of land governed by a lord or lady. There are two main types of manorial court: the court leet and the court baron. The former dealt with large crimes and official appointments such as constables of the manor, while the latter was involved with more trivial cases often directly relating to local issues. For example, the Morpeth Court leet of 4th October 1779 makes reference to ‘permitting and suffering one sow and twelve Pigs The property of the said Robert Reed to go loose and at large upon the Kings highstreet within the said Borough.’ (SANT/BEQ/28/1/3/147-148 – Handwritten extracts from proceedings of Lord Carlisle’s Court Leet held at Morpeth, Northumberland, on 4 Oct 1779, nd. [c.1800]) At first, this seems a rather odd ‘crime’ which from the modern day can be seen as a funny historical tidbit. However, when looking through more manorial documents, we can see that this is actually an oft repeated wrongdoing and appears to be akin in commonality to the modern-day parking ticket. Indeed, there was a similar case in Newcastle recently, so perhaps history repeating itself refers to more than just the governmental mistakes of a given period! (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-46794382)

(Morpeth Court leet of 4th October 1779, showing several persons ‘crimes’ of allowing pigs and sows to ‘go loose and at large’)

Additionally, call rolls list every person who lived within the bounds of the manor’s legal grounds. Manorial bounds can sometimes be identified using perambulations, documents which detail the specific borders and usually exist due to a disagreement by two landowners. This enables a Northumberland native, or the ancestors of one, to trace their family ties through history. This of course makes such documents incredibly useful to aspiring genealogists and those tracing a family tree, especially when used in conjunction to other sources such as Ancestry. (https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/8978/?redirectFor=db.aspx) They can also be used to trace more well-known figures, and potentially create links between places, people and events which are not already known about. This is especially interesting in the Northumberland manors proximity to the Scottish borders, where the cultural fluidity exemplified by the border reivers can be seen through the differing names and traditions compared to other English manors. This can also be seen at the Swinburne Charters Project, which focused on the documents of the Swinburne family. They were significant players in the Border Marches and such projects highlight how the manorial documents of places such as Norham Castle can offer a secondary insight into areas where other projects focus. (Swinburne Charters Project)

Some of the information gleaned from these manorial documents has been written about already, in the previous blogs on this website which can be found here (https://northumberlandarchives.com/manorial-documents-register-project/). After discussing the many uses and interesting facets of manorial documents (and ticking off a first blog which doesn’t technically use them very much), I’m excited to get stuck in and bring to light even more interesting historical findings for Northumberland’s ever-growing historiography. Hopefully you are too!

#heritagelotteryfund

Tied to the land – serfs from manorial history

by

Through our manorial research we often come across references to serfdom, the ancient custom where people were owned by the lord of the manor. Though a complicated picture unfree people at this time largely fell into two types – villeins or bondsmen, who were unfree tenants that had some rights of inheritance over their home and land, and serfs, who were personally unfree. Some had far fewer rights and freedoms than others, and these are often hard to define as manorial structure differed from manor to manor.

After the Black Death the remaining workforce was in demand, and both groups were able to acquire better rights. This meant that in most places these sorts of ties to the land and the lord died out. However serfs could still be found in the 14th and 15th century in Woodhorn, Seaton, Hurst, Newbiggin and the barony of Mitford. These people formed the backbone of the manorial system, but leave very little trace in the historical record. However in the course of our research for our Manor Authority files (see this previous blog for how this is done) we sometimes find their names given, a fantastic insight into ordinary people’s lives in the medieval period. We will be looking at examples we have come across that help explain the lives of unfree serfs and bondsmen in Northumberland’s manors, and show what services to the lord of the manor were expected of them.

A representation of a medieval manor

 

Some serfs were made and some were born. Roger Maudut claimed Ralph le Lorimer as his ‘nief’. This is a term for a type of serf, from old French, and is often

Read moreTied to the land – serfs from manorial history

Private stocks and gallows – crime and punishment in the Manor

by

We have covered a little about how law and order was kept by the manorial system when we looked at customs in a previous blog, but what about crimes that broke laws, not just customs? The manorial court or court Leet met around twice a year and dealt with minor boundary issues and scuffles. Most manor courts, though not usually recording such punishments, seem to have kept stocks, pillories and tumbrels for punishing those guilty of smaller crimes. Stocks trapped the prisoner around the ankles, while a pillory held them around the neck and wrists. In both the prisoner would be further subjected to abuse and refuse thrown from the crowd. The tumbrel was a two-wheeled manure cart, which would be used to transport the prisoner and perhaps tip them into a pond – the practice often referred to as ‘ducking’. Tuggal Manor was fined 1 shilling 8 pence in 1683 for not keeping a pair of stocks. Presumably they would have been a common sight as you travelled around the country, and some towns like Berwick still have theirs on display.

From an engraving of Defoe in the pillory in the early eighteenth century, SANT/BEQ/15/4/40. Daniel Defoe was pitied for his charge of seditious libel, and the crowd threw flowers, a vast improvement on their usual weapons of choice.

However in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a manorial court could, with royal permission, become a franchised law court dealing with more serious cases, and we have found evidence of a few of these as we have been researching the manor authority files. The whole picture of medieval law is too complex to delve into in a short blog post, but the various parts of the machine can be grouped into three types of legal administration: the central courts of law; different types of smaller courts held by itinerant commissioned justices as they progressed around the country; and permanent local franchise courts. The franchise of the legal responsibility for a particular area might be given by the crown to a hundred, borough, or the feudal courts of the Court Baron or manorial court. Some lords held the ancient right of ‘infangthief’ and ‘outfangthief’, where if they caught thieves from within or from outside the manor red-handed on their land, they could try and fine them. Those whose manor was franchised held royal permission to maintain a gallows and tumbril to execute anyone found guilty. This was possibly a hangover from the Anglo-

Read morePrivate stocks and gallows – crime and punishment in the Manor

+ More