Lords, tenants and attitudes to manorial officeholding, c.1300-c.1600

Gibbs, Alex Spike (2019) Lords, tenants and attitudes to manorial officeholding, c.1300-c.1600. Agricultural History Review, 67 (2). 155 - 174. ISSN 0002-1490

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Abstract

Recent revisionist scholarship has challenged the view that the relationship between lords and tenants in late medieval England was inherently conflictual. However the consequences of this revisionism for the position of manorial officials, individuals drawn from a lord’s tenants to help run his manor, have not yet been fully considered. Using the surviving court rolls of three case-study manors, this article demonstrates that tenants were invested in an effectively functioning system of officers, which met their needs in the manor court. This led them to police both officials and the wider community independently of seigneurial pressure to ensure officers performed their work correctly. This ‘positive’ attitude of tenants towards manorial officeholding in turn has greater ramifications in explaining the persistence of manorial structures into the sixteenth century and implying that the exercise of manorial lordship was as much collaborative as conflictual.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bahs/agrev
Additional Information:	© 2019 British Agricultural History Society
Divisions:	Economic History
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD100 Land Use
JEL classification:	N - Economic History > N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Income, and Wealth > N33 - Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Income and Wealth: Europe: Pre-1913 Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q1 - Agriculture > Q15 - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation
Date Deposited:	23 Oct 2019 14:00
Last Modified:	27 Feb 2024 06:27
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/102185

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