Writing the Manor: Manorial Officers and Rural Writing Culture, c. 1425–1518

This thesis explores late medieval rural writing culture as it was expressed in the documents produced by professional manorial officers on lay gentry estates. Studies of rural writing culture and of officers’ writing have tended to focus on moments of complaint, or exceptional survivals; yet they have also drawn attention to the connection between officers’ work and their writing, and to the complexity and multiplicity of a broader rural writing culture. To expand this work, this thesis turns instead to manorial documents, which represent a significant and normative body and practice of rural writing; examining them is to explore a neglected mass experience of rural writing.

Each chapter asks how officers and their labour were represented in manorial documents, examining in turn: manorial accounts from Mote, East Sussex; survey-type documents from four Kentish manors; and the remembrance book of an officer in Norfolk. This thesis takes what is – for these document classes – an unusually imaginative approach to their analysis, responding to calls to turn a more literary lens on administrative documents, and inspired by approaches developed in the study of legal documents and by literary and art history scholars.

This thesis draws together two well-established points – that manorial documents were important to the manor’s integrity and prosperity, and that they might contain “fictional” elements – and takes the latter as more than a methodological challenge. It suggests that writing manorial documents provided officers with space to create a textual manor which had significance when it came to conceptualising and managing their reality. Officers were important participants in a rural writing culture; responsive to their audiences, comfortable in a multilingual textual space, and finding creative potential in the forms, processes, language, and conventions of manorial administration. Their work attests to the cultural vitality of the late medieval manor and its writing.