Medieval Society and the Manor Court
Zvi Razi and Richard Smith
Abstract
The records of manorial courts have been used increasingly as the principal source for the reconstruction of rural and small town society in Medieval England. They offer a unique source with which to investigate peasant demography, family patterns, the village community and economy, the characteristics and instruments of customary law and the ways in which that law was perceived and exploited by landlords and tenants. The chapters in this collection provide novel approaches to all of these themes. In two introductory chapters, this book reviews the historiography of manorial court rolls and ac ... More
The records of manorial courts have been used increasingly as the principal source for the reconstruction of rural and small town society in Medieval England. They offer a unique source with which to investigate peasant demography, family patterns, the village community and economy, the characteristics and instruments of customary law and the ways in which that law was perceived and exploited by landlords and tenants. The chapters in this collection provide novel approaches to all of these themes. In two introductory chapters, this book reviews the historiography of manorial court rolls and account for their origins as a distinctive record of customary law within the broad context of medieval European society. An appendix contains an inventory of the most comprehensive manorial court roll series arranged systematically on a county-to-county basis, detailing the repository in which they are located.
Keywords:
manorial courts,
Medieval England,
village community,
peasant demography,
family patterns,
customary law,
landlords,
tenants
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 1996 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198201908 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198201908.001.0001 |
