How much can one expect to learn about the family that held a manor from the surviving manorial rolls of its manor(s)? This may seem a very elementary sort of question, but it is not clear to me how helpful these records may be in establishing the pedigrees of manor lords as opposed to the tenants of their manor(s). I expect, of course, that they vary from place to place and era to era, but can one expect to find certain constants that may prove helpful to one's research into the genealogies of their holders? I hope to learn more about this from the experts on the list. Thank you, Richard

From: Richard Carruthers via [gen-medieval@rootsweb.com] Sent: 08 May 2016 07:04 > > How much can one expect to learn about the family that held a manor from the surviving manorial rolls of its manor(s)? > > This may seem a very elementary sort of question, but it is not clear to me how helpful these records may be in establishing the pedigrees of manor lords as opposed to the tenants of their manor(s). > > I expect, of course, that they vary from place to place and era to era, but can one expect to find certain constants that may prove helpful to one's research into the genealogies of their holders? > > I hope to learn more about this from the experts on the list. > > Thank you, > > Richard > ------------------------------- ________________________________________ I'm afraid manor court rolls won't be much use for this purpose, from any period or region. Being concerned solely with regulating the affairs of the tenants of the manor and extracting dues from them, they seldom contain any information at all about the lord of the manor, often not even his name. Some court rolls state the name of the lord in the heading at the start of each court, and if you get a continuous series of rolls you may be able to make deductions from the dates when the name changes - but many rolls do not mention the lord's name at all (it becomes more common from the sixteenth century onwards), and anyway continuous series of rolls are rare. In fact the survival of court rolls is not good generally - many more have been lost than have survived, and the survivals tend to be from manors owned by ecclesiastical institutions such as monasteries and dioceses, and by the great aristocratic families, rather than those owned by the gentry. There is one special type of manor court which would be particularly useful for your purpose, the court of recognition. This was held when a new lord came into possession of the manor and all the tenants assembled to acknowledge him as their new lord (and, inevitably, to pay him a fee for the privilege) - but these were not always held and are not often met. The same comments apply to the two other great categories of manorial records: account rolls, and the various types of survey - extents, rentals, custumals and the like. They will never give any information about the lord, and will only occasionally even provide his name. You would stand a slightly better chance of getting genealogical information from the rolls of adjoining or neighbouring manors where the lord owned smaller properties as a sub-tenant of the local manor. Here the death of the lord and the identity of his heir will often be recorded, especially if the property is copyhold rather than leasehold or freehold. But ownership by manorial lords of small properties in neighbouring manors was uncommon in the high medieval period, only becoming prevalent in the fifteenth century and later (when holding land by copyhold tenure became socially acceptable). And court rolls unfortunately record less and detail about freeholds and leaseholds from the fifteenth century onwards. Matt Tompkins