Power, Community and the Manor Court in Sixteenth-Century English Society

This thesis seeks to establish why, given the withdrawal of manorial lords from direct administration of their estates, and the extinction of personal unfreedom in the late medieval period, the manor court continued to be a governing institution in so many English rural communities up to the end of the sixteenth century. It argues that a manorial court, when run primarily by resident tenants and subject to little outside interference, possessed many of the attributes necessary for the effective and sustainable control of common resources by their users. Close reading and analysis of the manorial documents of six manors in three case-study areas, supported by a survey of the historiography of sixteenth-century village studies, is used to support this argument.