In October of 2022 a small team comprising Dave Harris, Helen Wright and Claire Wright finished the two year project of transcribing and translating nine Latin manorial court rolls for Stalbridge manor. The main printed document is available to view by appointment at the Stalbridge Archive. We have been given permission from the authors to display the summaries of the Translation of Stalbridge Manorial Court Rolls 1697-1702. In addition to this we have used, with kind permission, some of the explanatory text and the glossary from the website stalbridgewestonmanor.uk, which contains the Stalbridge Weston manorial court rolls.
A manor was the basic unit of land ownership and local administration in England from medieval times to the nineteenth century – in essence, an estate with a lord, tenants and a court. The court handled property transfers, boundary disputes, inheritance and the sort of local quarrels that small rural communities reliably generate. It was required to keep records.
A manor was both an agricultural estate and a small legal jurisdiction rolled into one, and its court was the place where the lord’s legal rights and the tenants’ customary rights and obligations met and were written down.
The law distinguished two kinds of business. The Court Baron dealt with the internal economy of the manor: the lord’s property rights and the tenants’ tenures, including admissions and surrenders, rents, fines, heriots, and the state of buildings and land. Where the lord possessed the franchise, a Court Leet (with view of frankpledge) also sat, handling minor matters of policing and regulation such as strays, nuisances, assaults of a lesser kind, weights and measures, and the maintenance of shared resources and rights.
In theory these were separate courts with separate juries; in practice many manors, Stalbridge Weston among them, ran them together and did both kinds of business on the same day. The Weston court met once a year as a rule, occasionally twice, over the period 1663–1716 (with no courts, or no surviving records, in 1664 and 1675).
The lord is named at the top of every court but there’s no evidence they were ever physically present. The Seneschal or steward is the lord’s working representative. The free suitor is a freeholder who owes attendance but holds his land outright. The homage is the working jury of copyhold tenants, typically eight to a dozen of the most substantial men in the manor, sworn on oath to present everything that needs reporting. Later rolls also name a hayward, responsible for managing the common fields, the pound and the impounding of stray livestock. Where fines needed calibrating, two affeerers – usually drawn from the homage itself – were appointed to set them at a fair level.
Everyone else on the manor who held land from the lord owed suit of court: they were expected to turn up. Legitimate absence could be ‘essoined’ (excused, usually for illness). Unexcused absence was ‘amerced’, meaning fined – often a token 3d or 6d, but a public mark against the tenant. Not all those who failed to appear were amerced every time. Those who were not fined may have made valid excuses that were not recorded.
The rolls follow a fairly constant pattern. Each court opens with a formal heading: the manor, the lord, the date in both the king’s regnal year and the year of Our Lord, and (by the early eighteenth century) the name of the Seneschal. Then comes the attendance roll: free suitors, homage, essoins, tenants present, tenants absent, widows present, widows absent. Then the property transactions – the heart of the document – recording who surrendered what, who took what, on what terms, for whose lives, at what rent, with what heriot, for what fine. Then the presentments from the homage: deaths since the last court, buildings out of repair, boundaries trespassed, rights reaffirmed. Then the closing material: amercements, the names of the affeerers, and sometimes a signature or two.
The phrase that crops up again and again in the property transactions is surrendered into the hands of the lord. Copyhold land could not be sold or passed on directly between tenants; the only legal way to transfer it was to give it back to the lord and have the lord grant it out again on a new ‘copy’. The court roll entry is therefore the only legal record of what has happened, and the tenant’s proof of title was literally a copy of that entry – which is where the name comes from. Grants were usually made ‘for the term of their lives’ to two or three named people (often a husband and wife, or a father and son), with the last survivor holding until death. When that last person died, the holding fell back to the lord and the heir had to pay a fine to be admitted anew.
Three things were owed in this cycle: an annual rent (modest, fixed by custom), a heriot on the death of the tenant (usually the best beast or the best goods), and a fine on admission, which was where the lord made his real money.
Until 1752, England’s legal year began on 25 March, so a court dated (say) 18 February 1693 in the old style is February 1694 in the new. The rolls also give dates in regnal years: ‘the second year of the reign of the King, our lord James the Second’ is 1686. Spelling is phonetic: Loder and Loader, Snook and Snooke, Hellier and Hellyer and Hillier, Joyliffe and Jolliffe and Joliffe are all the same families, and the same scribe will often switch spellings in the same entry. Place-names do the same. The transcripts preserve the spellings of the original.
The text for this blog has been taken (with permission) from the website https://stalbridgewestonmanor.uk/
You can find out more on The Stalbridge Weston Manorial Court rolls by visiting the new, excellent website. (click on the link above)
For the Stalbridge Manor version of the court rolls just click on the button below to visit our page.
All content on the page has been used by permission of the authors- David Harris, Helen Wright and Claire Wright, who retain copyright over this material. The glossary of terms used in the court rolls has been replicated from the original version on the Stalbridge Weston Manor website.