Manorial Documents Register Project Archives - Page 2 of 5

A peppercorn at Christmas and other presents

23/12/2016 by Northumberland Archives

Christmas as we understand it today has formed within the last two centuries, and is quite alien to the localised traditions of the medieval and Tudor periods. Though the religious importance of the day was celebrated, everyday business often still carried on. Documents still had to be signed, assizes and courts held, and yes, unfortunately even rents had to be paid at Christmas. This marked one of the four financial quarters of the year. The financial New Year began on Lady Day (25^th March), with Midsummer (24^th June), Michaelmas (29^th September) and Christmas (25^th December) forming the quarters. Rents, tithes, charity and other payments could be due quarterly, half-yearly or annually on these or other specified religious days. For example in 1296 the tenantry of West Chirton township annually paid 3s at Martinmas and Whitsuntide for fine of court, 1s 3d cornage at Michaelmas, one mark every seven years at Easter and Christmas, and 3s 4d on St Barnabas’s day.

However rents were often paid in supplies, or items that were more like presents. In the compilation of our Manor Authority files we often come across these payments in kind, so here are some of the more seasonal gifts we have spotted. If you have come across any others we would love to know.

Some of the rents we have come across – a peppercorn, chickens, cinnamon and a feast.

Peppercorns

These payments in kind were often made in edible commodities, such as the 11d., and a pound of pepper paid yearly by Robert Freman for land in Hadston. The services of tenants in Bywell were also worth £14 13s 3d and 4lbs of pepper.

Though pepper was an important commodity, we more commonly find payments of a single peppercorn. If you wished to give your son a house on one of your manors you needed some form of payment to be given to ensure you both had rights as landlord and tenant. Even a tiny sum ensured this, which gave birth to the ‘peppercorn rent’, where a property would be given in exchange for a single peppercorn annually. It was often used to provide family members with entitlement to property. John Salkeld, in his will in 1623, gave his new house at Rock to his son Thomas, who was required to pay ‘a peppercorn yearlie’ to his older brother John, the new owner of Rock. Thomas Forster rented a number of tithes and properties in Carham and Wark to his son for a peppercorn in 1711.

A peppercorn was paid by Elizabeth de Felton for part of ‘Thresterton’ (Thirston), and by Walter de Edlingham for an area of Edlingham. The request of a peppercorn was sometimes followed by ‘if demanded’, showing this was a symbolic gesture.

Hens

Unfree tenants often paid part of their rents through the year in crops, and this includes chickens. In Fenwick the eight bondmen paid sixteen hens to the lord of the manor, with the five cottars required to pay five hens. They also gave eggs at Easter. In Acklington a fowl (or a penny) was paid every Christmas by the bond tenants in addition to the rest of their rent, while the inhabitants of Thirston gave the Acklington park keeper a ‘wod henne’, to allow them to gather wood there through the year. In the sixteenth century Chatton’s bailiff also received a wood hen, allowing locals to take firewood from the lord’s wood, including an oak tree as a yule log. Free tenants in Thirston also paid a rent of hens and nuts at Christmas in the fourteenth century. In 1717 a description of Edward Riddell’s estate described the East Farm in Great Swinburne as let to four tenants for £95, a goose and a hen each year. Unfortunately the estate register does not say what time of year this was paid, but perhaps this was Edward’s Christmas goose.

Spices

Though spices have become closely connected to our traditional Christmas cooking, they have been an important commodity for longer than you think. In around 1280 Gilbert de Withill purchased land at Dunstan and was required to pay the overlord a pound of ‘cummin’ annually at Alnwick fair. Isoud and Aviz the widow held 12 acres in Felton for a pound of cumin, and this continued to the rent for this land later, likely in fealty to Mitford Castle. A pound of Cinnamon was paid, fittingly, by ‘William the cook’ for the two bovates of land he held in Belford. Heaton manor was held at different times for a payment of a sparrowhawk, or a rose, but after the land and the manor were divided into separate moieties Robert of Ryal paid Margery of Trewick a pound of cumin for land there and a root of ginger for the manor.

A festive feast

In return for his land Liulf of Middleton Hall was required to give four ‘waitinges’ yearly in 1154 to his lord Patrick I earl of Dunbar. Waitinges were where a leaseholder provided the lord and his household with hospitality, usually on feast days.

Robes

Though not quite a Christmas jumper, Titlington was granted for one robe at Christmas with 100 shillings and four quarters of corn and barley. Robes were also received at Christmas by the foresters of Rothbury Forest in addition to their wages.

We hope to put up more of these unusual rent payments that we have found soon, let us know if you have come across any. All of the above were sourced from the Northumberland County Histories series and Hodgson’s History of Northumberland, which are invaluable sources to our manorial research.

St Andrew’s day – Scottish law in Northumbrian manors

30/11/2016 by Northumberland Archives

As Northumberland is the most northerly English county the history of its manors is tied very closely to Scotland and its history. War has shaped the fortunes of many manors, but this is also the case with cooperation between the two countries. The connection between them is local, not just national, and Northumberland’s manors have played a role in that history. The whole picture is far too detailed and interesting to deal with in a short blog post, with so many wars, conflicts, rebellions and raids, but we can look at what impact the relationship had on the way manors were run and the terms they used.

Wark-on-Tweed manor has a fascinating cross border history, and has changed between being English and Scottish at different times in its history.

Early in manorial history many manors were owned by the Scottish Kings and noblemen. For example in 1279 the kings of Scotland rented two thirds of Bellingham Manor to the Bellingham family by a Serjeanty, or condition, where the Bellingham family acted as the king of Scotland’s forester in Tynedale forest. Eleventh and twelfth century conflict between the countries changed this ownership. The king of Scotland’s portion of the manor was seized by Edward I during war with Scotland and was later given with other lands to Edmund earl of Cambridge, later duke of York, by his father Edward III. Edward III forced the Scottish king and nobles to give up the southern counties of Scotland in 1334, and nobles forfeited their estates in England, including Patrick V earl of Dunbar whose manor of Middleton Hall was granted to Henry Percy.

Warfare damaged the crops in many manors, bringing no income for the lord of the manor and famine for the inhabitants. A number of manors were expected to provide soldiers and equipment in peace and war, such as Corbridge which had to provide one man! A lawsuit of 1579 over a small holding at Burton shows that land tenure in Northumberland still came with a requirement to serve in protecting the border. Peles and other fortified dwellings were often built by the lords of manors for safety. Even manors a good distance from the border were vulnerable, with Longhoughton described as ruined and waste after wars in 1368, and from cattle raids in 1573. Border reivers operated from both sides of the border, and watches would be kept for reivers in many places. One example from the Order of watches in 1552 shows a night watch was kept between Hitchcroft in Shilbottle to Rugley in Alnwick by ten men from Shilbottle, Whittle, Sturton Grange, Birling, High and Low Buston, Wooden and Bilton townships.

However it is the everyday business in manorial documents that show the connection – Scottish law and terminology was sometimes applied across the border. We have below a few Scottish terms we have found in the manorial records.

We found ‘Grassum’ was paid in what is known as the West Water manors (the manors of Melkridge, Henshaw and Ridley & Thorngrafton). This was paid every 21 years from 1758-1885 for some of the leasehold tenements, and recorded in one book for the purpose (ZBL 66). Looking at a few Scottish law sources this can be a sum paid by a tenant at a renewal or grant of a lease, or a single payment made in addition to a payment such as rent or feudaty. It might be comparable to the English term premium. It is hard to say why Grassum would have been paid there, or for how long the practice was carried out. The key may be right back in the early history of the manors, when they were owned by the Kings of Scotland and leased to a number of noble Scottish families such as the earls of Athol and earls of Badenoch.

As covered in a previous post, there were numerous jobs associated with the manorial court, and Scottish roles were similar to many in the English manor courts. For example in Norham, now a small English village on the banks of the River Tweed overlooking Scotland, we find the Scottish term ‘Land liners’ used. Within Scottish burghs, as in the English equivalent, Boroughs, the inhabitants (burgesses) were entitled to a ‘burgage plot’ of land. Whilst in an English manor a ‘fence-looker’ would check the legality of such boundaries, in Scotland and Norham, the term ‘land liner’ was used for this official who measured out and checked the size of the burgage plots.

Our project is continuing to compile the history of each manor at a time and through doing so will be continuing to post about the interesting terms and stories we find.

The Northumbrian County Histories Volumes I, V, and XV have been of great use in the preparation of this blog, as have The Concise Scots Dictionary and Law Basics: Glossary of Scottish Legal Terms (O’Rourke and Duncan).

Fancy letters and famous faces

28/09/2016 by Northumberland Archives

Having previously looked at marks made by clerks and residents of the manors, we will now look beyond the doodles to decorative letters and drawings that are works of art in themselves. Though these had been commonly used in the medieval period their use declined through the centuries, and by the seventeenth century were reserved for a few areas of written texts, such as the legal documents like deeds. In those occasions where they remained they became less about the content of the text and more for decoration. as we go through our manorial documents we often come across examples that are eye-catching.

Below is a nice example of a letter done with shapes and swirls.

One that is a little more complicated…

More complicated still…

Or this one, from a document of Charles I, which takes it further…

This is so stylised it becomes difficult to make out the ‘C’ it represents.

However, many examples contain drawings. In the medieval manuscripts these are known as historiated initials and inhabited initials. A historiated initial relates to a picture in the letter that relates to the text, where an inhabited letter is purely decorative. The below sixteenth century example is an inhabited letter, which includes a rather unusual face. Perhaps he goes back to earlier traditions of the psalter and other illuminated works.

We start to see images of the monarch used in some documents such as deeds, and these historiated initials are very skilfully and professionally done. The monarch would be depicted in a cartouche, often attached to the first letter of their name. The earliest example we have come across is James I:

James is shown on his throne next to a stylised ‘J’. Under his cloak he appears to be shown in medieval dress. His shoes are certainly of a much older style, quite unlike the decorative heeled shoes he is usually depicted wearing. Next to the image are the symbols for England (rose), Scotland (thistle) and Wales (fleur-de-lis) joined together, illustrating that the three countries were united by his rule. The swirls turning to leaves may also hark back to an early style of decorating pages.

Next we have James’s son, Charles I.

We can see Charles I in a cartouche, surrounded with ornate patterned decoration and a panel showing roses, unicorns, and other emblems of state, with swirling rose leaves filling the space. The letters are also very ornately decorated. The image of Charles is very well drawn, and shows him with the crown, orb and sceptre.

We have also come across Charles’s granddaughter, Queen Anne. This, like many decorated examples, is an ‘Exemplification of Recovery’, which recorded the breaking or ‘barring’ of an entail (a passage of land solely down the family line), so that the land became fee simple and could be mortgaged, sold or willed to someone not in the entail. They became obsolete in 1833, but were often highly decorated with the monarch’s image and seal to show authenticity.

Queen Anne, from an Exemplification of Recovery, 1710.

Here we see Queen Anne in a cartouche, with her hair elaborately curled and wearing a chain of jewels. The pearl necklace she wears is perhaps the one still owned and worn by the royal family today.

Detail from the same Exemplification of Recovery, 1710.

Further along the top of the same document we see a great deal of detailed decoration. The swirling leaves in Charles I’s decoration have grown to become huge scrolling acanthus leaves, which support a rose, and cover much of the top section. Between the leaves we have the Royal coat of arms of Great Britain. This has Queen Anne’s own motto beneath it – ‘Semper Eadem’, meaning ‘always the same’.

These are some examples we have come across in our research, but there are a great many more in our collection, including this beautiful and ostentatious deed from the reign of George II. The decoration transforms an ordinary legal document into something fantastic and beautiful, and gives an added value to the claim that it upholds. We will be keeping our eyes peeled for more monarchs and interesting letters as the project continues.

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