CHAPTER VIII
THE MANOR COURT
A) he owes suit of court from three weeks to three weeks.
Such is the formula that concludes the list of services
owed by many thousands of tenants, and its due fulfil-
ment wTas often one of the most irksome and difficult of duties.
The Manor Court, as its name implies, was held by the lord or
one of his officials, and whether his jurisdiction was feudal or
manorial in its origin we need not enquire.1 It was a court with
varying powers: on some manors the lord is seen to be dealing
solely with his villeins and generally only with matters arising
from the economic administration of his manor, while on others
not only villeins but free men are in question, and not only
economic matters are transacted, but criminal charges are in-
vestigated, fines and levies are raised, and the keeping of the
King's peace, and other matters which would seem to belong to
the Crown are dealt with. By the late thirteenth and the four-
teenth century, lawyers were trying to tidy up this confusion of
functions: the Quo Warranto proceedings investigated the juris-
dictions of lords of manors, and the King's lawyers found every-
where that men were exercising rights to which they had no
claim whatsoever but ancient seisin, or in plain English—en-
croachment. Lords in their manorial courts had become
possessed of franchises which the lawyers said belonged only to
the King: the view of frank-pledge and the right to hold a court
leet, for example, were widely claimed, but few could show any
document which gave them such rights.
Even greater rights were sometimes claimed. The Quo
Warranto rolls afford us an immense body of evidence, much of
it going to prove that on innumerable manors the King's powers
over life and limb, as well as over lesser matters, had been usurped.
Some lords, it is true, could produce charters in which "large
and general terms" seemed to convey considerable powers to
them, but the general tendency from the twelfth century onward
* See Selden Soc. II, xxxixf. for Maitland's discussion of this point.