MANORIAL TREATISES 155
books of estate management which were written down in the late
thirteenth century, such as Fleta, Walter of Henley and others.
It is necessary, however, to add a word of caution at the outset
concerning the use of these works. Leopold Delisle noted the
wealth of early handbooks on estate management which have
survived in England, and he lamented that no such records
survived in France. But they have not been an unmixed blessing.
Many students of manorial documents written in the late
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries will have noticed how diffi-
cult it is to find in Court Rolls or in Ministers' Accounts many
examples which will bear out the statements of these contem-
porary manuals of estate management. Walter of Henley or Fleta
can tell us with a wealth of confident detail the exact duties of, say,
the sergeant (serviens), the bailiff and the reeve. The sergeant,
they say, does this and this; the bailiff may do that and that;
while the reeve is restricted to exercising his authority here and
here. The documents, however, tell us quite another story, and
show us the sergeant usurping the duties of bailiff or of reeve;
and worse still, the underlings daring to act in ways in which only
their superiors should do. The question at once arises: Which
are we to accept as giving the more trustworthy witness—the
treatises or the various types of manorial records? The question
would seem to be easily answered a priori in favour of the docu-
ments, were it not for the fact that the influence of the treatises on
modern scholars has been so great that almost all accounts of the
working of the medieval manor are based on some such con-
dition of affairs as is set forth in the pages of Fleta, etc. And
this, no doubt, is the inevitable evolution of the study of these
intricate matters: first, attention is paid to the general theory
and contemporary exposition, and only later comes scrutiny of
the minutiae.
Thus the late Dr Cunningham writes:
The bailiff was appointed by the lord to look after the whole estate
in detail; he was directly responsible to the lord for everything con-
nected with the prosperity of the estate, and had to account in great
detail for everything under his charge----The (reeve) seems to have
been the official representative of the villeins, who was responsible
for them.1
1 Walter of Henleyp, Intro, xii, xiii.