This chapter explores the transition from a medieval picture of manorial courts as being focused on seignorial concerns to an early modern picture of being focused on community concerns. Through categorising presentments, it demonstrates that the role of manorial officials went through two transitions between c.1300 and c.1650. Firstly, there was a shift away from seignorial and royal business to a community-focused ‘little commonwealth’ where courts worked to maintain local infrastructure and common lands. In a second transition, in the seventeenth century some courts began to be purely focused on land registration and transfers. However, these changes occurred in the context of local variation and a wider East Anglian versus western/south-western divide. These findings support two conclusions. Firstly, they challenge a narrative of the decline of manorial structures, showing how the adaptability of courts allowed them to be put to a wide range of uses by communities. Secondly, they highlight that manorial institutions were not imposed by lords in a top-down process, but were shaped by local officials, who recognised the utility of these institutions for their own purposes.

The conclusion lays out the four key arguments of the book. Firstly, manorial structures remained important to community governance across the late medieval and early modern eras. Secondly, the impetus for this continued vitality came from communities of tenants who recognised the value of manorial structures for their own needs. Thirdly, manorial governance could create a degree of inequality within communities, but this was constrained and varied between villages. Fourthly, state formation did not radically disrupt these manorial structures. These arguments lead to several historiographical interventions. They challenge the notion of a late medieval decline, support positive interpretations of lord-tenant relations, demonstrate that long-term dynamics could create a ‘middling sort’ and suggest some reasons for England’s early development of high state capacity. Finally, the chapter makes some comparisons with other European regions, demonstrating that while the emergence of local elites managing aspects of their community’s economy and society was universal, the exact relationship between lord, state and community created different governance structures.

This chapter investigates the connection between officeholding and serfdom in light of new interpretations which have suggested that serfdom, rather than being a significant liability that the unfree fought hard to remove, was instead characterised by routine obligations and disappeared quickly after the Black Death. Through comparing lists of officers with records of landholding and personal status, it finds that both free and customary landholders served in office. It also demonstrates that serving in office was rarely resisted as an obligation and that while officials did help enforce some aspects of serfdom, they were no longer doing this by the mid-sixteenth century, and even before this only enforced limited aspects of personal unfreedom which likely did not disadvantage tenants in a meaningful way. These findings highlight that the division between unfree and free landholding was breaking down in the late Middle Ages, but also, more significantly, show that officials were not put-upon unfree servants. Communities of tenants were not forced to serve in office but recognised the utility of manorial structures for meeting their own objectives.

This chapter explores the concerns about their community which might have led manorial officials to govern their communities in the way described for the middling sort by historians of early modern England. It begins by examining the way officials controlled misconduct, finding that elites did use office to monitor those perceived as troublemakers, but the level of attention varied significantly over time and space. It then examines the way management of the landscape and resources led to governance which promoted community coherence but also differentiation. It finds that while officials everywhere were concerned with preventing the abrogation of communal rights by neighbouring communities, the extent of monitoring of tenants varied by settlement type and landscape. While in communities which were heavily enclosed, or consisted of dispersed hamlets, there is little evidence of hierarchical governance, in communities with large nucleated villages and extensive commons, officials utilised bylaws to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbours. This suggests that a ‘proto-middling sort’ could be created through officeholding but this was a locally specific process.

The introduction starts by showing how the Swallowfield Articles, the famous record of the early modern ‘politics of the parish’, reveal the persistent importance of the ‘medieval’ manorial court leet to local governance. It then provides an overview of both the medieval and early modern historiography, showing how a newer set of contributions has emphasised continuity between these eras by revealing the importance of manor courts after 1500, a long-run connection between state and locality stretching back into the Middle Ages, and the existence of a medieval local elite. It shows that a flaw in the literature remains the lack of cross-period studies which this book tackles by exploring the functions of manorial offices, who filled these offices, and the ways in which officeholding systems changed in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation using a long-run time frame stretching from 1300 to 1650. Next, the key features of the case-study manors (Horstead, Cratfield, Little Downham, Worfield and Fordington) are discussed. The final section provides a plan of the book.

This chapter examines the impact of state formation, in the form of the rise of the civil parish, on manorial governance structures. Through examining churchwardens’ accounts, it demonstrates that these officials at Worfield and Cratfield transformed from being local managers in the parish to being important agents of the state. However, comparison of the identities of churchwardens and manorial officials reveals that, throughout this transformation, the same individuals continued to hold both manorial and parochial roles. Moreover, qualitative evidence reveals that the powers of churchwardens and manorial officials were combined to meet the same objectives by these individuals, helping them meet their obligations to the lord and the crown. This questions a model of replacement of manor by parish which has been put forward by some early modernists, instead suggesting that the local parochial elite that state formation is often argued to have created was deeply rooted in the governing structure of the medieval manor.

This chapter investigates the impact of state formation, through the rise of the quarter sessions and the new responsibilities this gave village constables, on manorial governance structures. A county-wide case study of manors and quarter sessions’ records in Norfolk for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals that constables were fulfilling important roles for JPs in serving warrants, enforcing labour legislation and policing vagrancy. However, constables continued to be chosen in manorial courts and to be subject to the oversight of, and directed by, officials of courts leet. Examining the identities of constables at the case-study manors further shows that these individuals continued to serve in manorial office into the early modern period. Moreover, manorial courts since the fourteenth century ensured that constables fulfilled the requirements owed by vills to the crown, meaning that new obligations of constables to the state were underpinned by manorial structures. Therefore, the incorporation of constables into new county-wide structures of law and order was made possible through the local authority given to them via the manor court.