Manorial Jurisdiction

The jurisdiction of the manor court extended over the lands and tenements of which the manor itself was constituted. These consisted of demesne lands that the lord of the manor occupied, as well as "freeholds, farmes and customarie or coppihold tenements."^[1] As previously demonstrated, customary tenements possessed "divers services besides their rents properly belonging thereunto,"^[2] and the manor court existed in large measure in order to enforce their performance.

The manor had been the center of medieval village life, but its boundaries ranged widely, sometimes including only one village or embracing several of them; several manors could have existed even within one vill (township).^[3] The medieval manor of Minchinhampton-Avening included the townships of what later became the parishes of Minchinhampton and Avening. The bankruptcy of Edward Sheppherd, the lord of the manor, had precipitated the estate's division in the early nineteenth century;^[4] in his place, David Ricardo, the elder, assumed the rights of lordship at Minchinhampton, while William Playne did the same at Avening.^[5]

This division meant that the newly constituted manors would be congruent with their respective parishes. Horsley manor seems always to have been congruent with its parish, however, although minor boundary shifts clearly occurred over the course of time.^[6]

During the Middle Ages especially the lord of the manor assumed, through his Courts Baron and Leet, the constitutional authority of the King's agent. His status depended, more precisely, on the type of court over which he presided. Sometimes manors possessed only customary courts, the business of which remained confined to the enforcement of obligations due the lord. These courts included Courts of Recognition and Survey; the first took place on the accession of a new lord to a manor, while the second protected the lord's interests against fraud by his tenants. Simple customary courts were held more routinely for the purpose of collecting rents and fines. Since these courts were preoccupied solely with the private business of the lord, the law recognized the "manor" only as a Seignory. The Seignory became a manor when in addition the lord obtained the right to preside over a Court Baron.^[7]

The Court Baron exercised jurisdiction over minor civil infractions and established rules for communal agricultural practice. It also possessed the privilege of View of Frankpledge, which required the freeholders of the manor to attend its proceedings; customary tenants were required to pay suit by virtue of their tenures. View of Frankpledge often accompanied the right of the manor to hold a Court Leet, which exercised jurisdiction over criminal offenses such as assault or poaching. Not all manors held the privilege of a Court Leet, however, and criminal cases falling within their jursidictions were referred instead to the Hundred Court, which embraced a larger territorial unit.^[8] The manors of Minchinhampton-Avening and Horsley were located in Longtree Hundred, and each retained the privilege of a Court Leet, while Horsley served additionally as the Hundred Court.^[9] In practice, the proceedings of the customary courts followed those of the Courts Baron and Leet, but in the period under study, the lord conducted the proceedings of all three simultaneously.

Administratively, the manor divided into tithings, and the court elected their "tithingmen" or constables. Minchinhampton-Avening consisted of Minchinhampton, Rodborough, Avening,

Aston, and Pimbury tithings,^[10] and Horsley of Barton End, Dowend, Nupend, Tichmorend, and Nailsworth tithings.^[11] Avening tithing embraced lower Nailsworth and its hamlets such as Forest Green and Winsoredge, while Nailsworth tithing in Horsley included upper Nailsworth with the hamlets of Shortwood and Newmarket.^[12]

Tithingmen acted as mediators between villagers and the lord, enforcing court orders in their respective jurisdictions and reporting any infractions of customary rules. They drew up lists of offenders and presented them at court and on the day of a Court Baron could be seen leading the residents of their tithings in procession to the courtroom.^[13] The Court Baron, in other words, through the agency of the tithingmen, mobilized villagers in periodic demonstrations of obedience to authority, from which more remote settlements such as Nailsworth were not exempted. Nailsworth may have been somewhat isolated in the medieval and early modern periods^[14] but, as a tithing, was integrated into the administrative structures of both manors and must therefore have maintained contact with their communal activities. Dissenting communites would eventually form at Nailsworth because of its relative isolation, but even in the earliest period of their histories, they enjoyed amicable contact with established authority.^[15]

The mobilization of the inhabitants, on the occasion of a Court Baron, contained a democratic aspect. The court consisted not only of the lord presiding as judge but also of suitors themselves serving as elected jurors. Jurors were selected from among freeholders, regardless of rank, and "the better class of customary tenants."^[16] Juries may have originated in the will of the lord, but they were charged nonetheless with delivering verdicts on the most important issues touching the interests of the entire community, while the lord, too, remained legally subject to their jurisdiction.^[17]

Courts Baron and Leet continued to operate at Horsley and Minchinhampton well into the nineteenth century. At Horsley, lists of "persons giving suits and service [to] the manor" survive for the period 1794-1814. These surveys, compiled annually by the steward of the manor, group suitors by tithing and record next to each name any fines paid for nonattendance. By linking the manorial survey for 1811 to the Horsley parish census listing of that year, we can determine the occupations of suitors. By establishing

a further linkage with the names contained in the church roll of the Shortwood Baptist Church, we can also measure the extent to which committed Dissenters participated in the communal affairs of the manor.^[18]

Several questions require consideration. Did class differences between suitors have a significant bearing on their attendance at court? Did class differences and attendance at court vary significantly between Baptists and non-Baptists? The answers to these questions reveal the structure of deference with respect to both class and religion. If Dissenters owed suit-of-court, did they attend its proceedings? If they did not attend, did they pay a fine, or did they refuse to make any payment? Answers to these questions shed light on Dissenters' attitudes toward the Establishment at the moment when the Evangelical Revival began to intensify.

It is worth noting first that overall attendance at court remained low, yet significant enough, as figure 5 reveals. In most cases the court levied a fine of 1d. on tenants whom it failed to excuse, although sometimes it fined them 4d. to 6d. A mean of 85 percent of all suitors for the period failed to attend, but either were excused or complied by paying the fine. Virtually all unexcused absentees chose to pay the fine, however, while only a few, who appear sporadically in the records, refused all payment. In 1803 the court listed twenty-one names, or 4.6 percent of the suitors in that year who specifically refused to comply, while 412, or 91.8 percent, chose to do so. The only other protest against payment of the fine came in 1808: John Hyde of Tichmorend "wont pay [sic ]."^[19]

An absentee rate of 85 percent meant that the authority of the manor court had eroded, partly because it had gradually come to share its governing powers with the parish vestry and the Crown's Justices of the Peace, and partly because of a developing spirit of independence among its tenantry. Although the manor continued to exercise a certain amount of public authority, it must have been viewed increasingly as an agent of private aggrandizement. Still, the overwhelming majority of unexcused nonattendants tacitly acknowledged the lord's authority by consistently electing to pay fines. For laborers, clothworkers, and journeyman weavers, 1d was not necessarily a nominal sum, and their willingness to accede must be understood as an act of obeisance.

Fig. 5.
Series of suitors and nonattenders at the Court Baron, Horsley Manor, 
1794-1814.
Key: Star = All Suitors
Square = Absentees

The following reconstruction of attendance patterns at court is based on a sample of suitors in 1811 whose names could be linked to those appearing in the parochial census for that same year. For the purposes of analysis, their occupations have been grouped into the following categories: (1) gentlemen, yeomen, and clothiers representing the middle and upper classes; (2) retailers and artisans, constituting the lower middle class; and (3) weavers (many undoubtedly journeymen), spinners, shearmen, clothworkers, and laborers, making up the working class. Patterns of attendance by

class appear in table 18, and those by religious affiliation appear in tables 19 and 20.

After excluding the "excused" from analysis in table 18, the chi-square (x² ) statistic just barely fails the test of significance.^[20] The social class of suitors did not determine attendance patterns, since each class registered a high absentee rate proportional to its

size in the population. Since refusal to attend at court represented alienation from authority, these results suggest that all classes were alienated to the same degree. Yet most unexcused suitors, as we have seen, paid the fine in lieu of attendance, a display of deference that also became manifest despite religious differences (see table 19).

Baptists may be distinguished from others owing suit-of-court by linking the sample of suitors, derived from the 1811 parish census, to the membership roll of the Shortwood Baptist Church. Of the 215 suitors drawn from the original linkage, forty-one, or 19.1 percent, were members at Shortwood. This was an especially high percentage, since formal church membership among Baptists involved greater commitment than that of mere "hearers." Class differences between Baptists and non-Baptists, however, failed to materialize^[21] (see table 20).

Class differences did not, therefore, alter the near universal willingness to submit to the lord of the manor that the high rate of fine payment suggests. However, the high absentee rate, which resulted in the levying of fines, suggests a degree of alienation from the authority of the manor. This ambivalence resulted from a contradiction, already apparent in the structure of land tenure, between the growth of individualism and the persistence of ties of dependence. The growth of individualism was reflected especially in the progress of piecemeal enclosures and the decline of custom-

ary manorial practices, while the persistence of dependence became manifest in the slow waning of lordship and the transfer of its authority to parishes and Justices of the Peace. A significant percentage of Baptists, moreover, could be counted among the suitors of the manor court; they displayed the same combination of individualism and deference toward authority as did other suitors, whether Anglican or Dissenter. Their appearance in the court roll indicates, too, that their communities were not as isolated from manorial jurisdiction as commonly supposed; the growth of Dissent, as demonstrated equally in earlier chapters, may be seen to have coexisted with customary structures of authority.

The routine business of the manor court further substantiates this conclusion. Of the thirty-one persons presented before the court in 1802, ten, or 32.3 percent, were members at Short-wood.^[22] The presentments made before the court survive for a limited period (1802, 1807) but are indicative of the nature of its business. Land transactions were no longer recorded, but a great deal of activity, associated with the maintenance of communal agricultural practice, is clearly evident. Such maintenance mainly involved protection of the wasteland from encroachments by squatters, who erected cottages and created small enclosures.^[23] Encroachers, whose occupations are listed in table 21, were artisans, woolworkers, laborers, and lower-middle-class retailers or small clothiers. Their encroachments, however, were prosecuted with doubtful seriousness. Only small fines were levied, and the same offenders often reappeared in subsequent proceedings. In a sense, the lord accepted fines as de facto rent charges for what really amounted to trespassing. One can detect in this practice the tolerance associated with paternalism.

Still, in order to maintain his rights as a landowner, the lord could establish conformity to the letter of the law more insistently. At the Court Baron and Court of Survey for 1802 several tenants with possibly defective tenures were required to make appearances. Stephen Churches, for example, was required to appear, bearing "the original lease . . . granted . . . to Josiah Hutchings of the Parish of Horsley, broadweaver, of the messuage, garden and orchard now occupied by you."^[24] The lease ran for ninety-nine years determinable on the lives of the original tenant, his wife, and

his son. Stephen Churches was "to prove whether either and which of these lives are now living and if these lives be dead to shew by what title you now hold and occupy the said premises." The notices sent by the steward in 1802 to eight others in the same situation assumed this standard format. Evidently, the original tenants had sublet the properties without obtaining permission from the lord, who necessarily profited from such transactions.

If the Court Baron of 1802 concerned itself principally with prosecuting encroachers, the Court of Survey accompanying it sought to preserve the rights of lordship, of which the proper maintenance of tenancies was one aspect. In his charge to the jury, reproduced as appendix C, the steward of the manor outlined its responsibilities with respect to the lord's rights. Besides inquiring into the state of leaseholds, or making lists of tenants who owed suit-of-court, the jury was "to enquire if advantages have happened to the lord by Escheats or Forfeitures."^[25] Escheat was distinctively feudal in origin; it involved "the possibility of the land falling back into the hands of the lord, as representing the original

donor, on a failure of the tenant's heirs."^[26] As Frederick Pollock remarked, however, this remained a considerable anachronism in an age when "alienation by will is allowed without limit."^[27] Escheat applied at Horsley in 1802 in cases where a freeholder committed a felony and where "any Bastard having purchased Land within this Manor be dead without lawful Issue of his Body."^[28] Otherwise, the rights of inheritance remained sacrosanct. The survival of Escheat, even in an attenuated form, illustrates what the structure of land tenure and the attendance patterns at court have affirmed: the growth of individualism in the form of tenant property rights coexisted for a time with customary structures of authority.

Formally, Horsley's manor court retained the right to inquire into "any Thing unjustly done or omitted between lord and tenant or between Tenant and Tenant."^[29] Yet the absence of presentments concerned with such matters, other than those that touched the lord's interests directly, hints at the waning of the manor court's competence with the passage of time. It was to diminish further. The records of its proceedings had, indeed, survived into the late nineteenth century, but after 1815 presentments for offenses no longer appear in them. Only tithingmen were presented for election to their offices but in a very perfunctory and formal style.

The manor of Minchinhampton remained active longer because of the survival of Minchinhampton Common as a common grazing area and the need to regulate it. Preservation of the Common was a community concern, at least until the 1830s,^[30] to which the Court Baron gave institutional expression. A Court Baron, for example, was held at the Crown Inn on August 1, 1820 "for the purpose of adopting speedy and effectual measures to prevent the stealing of dung from off Hampton Common."^[31] At the same time, the jury deputed a number of freeholders from each tithing "to inspect the water courses, pools and wells, belonging to the aforesaid Common."^[32] As late as the 1820s, the Manor of Minchinhampton exercised its traditional function by mobilizing the inhabitants in communal action, which reinscribed deferential attitudes. Nevertheless, the manor continued to function only on this restricted basis, since it had come to share its communal responsibilities with parochial government. The parish provided

an alternative sphere of community, which nevertheless complemented the manor.