Surveys of the Manors of Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, 1631–2
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WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY 1RecorZ>s Jfirancb VOLUME IX FOR THE YEAR I953 Impression of 300 copies SURVEYS OF THE MANORS OF PHILIP EARL OF PEMBROKE AND MONTGOMERY 1631-2 EDITED BY ERIC KERRIDGE, Ph.D. DEVIZES 1953 FOR ROY AND MARTIN Reprinted photographieally, with one minor correction in MS and a reset title-page, by _70s. Adam of Brussels, I966. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY I-IEADLEY BROTHERS ‘LTD I09 KINGSWAY LONDON WC2 AND A5!-[FORD KENT CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION vii SURVEYS or Loan PEMBRoKE’S MANORS 1631-2 Bulbridge, Washerne and South Ugford 1 Broad Chalke I1 Dinton and Teffont 28 Fovant 40 Fugglestone 49 Netherhampton 56 Stanton St. Bernard 63 Stoke Farthing 72 West Overton 77 Wilton 82 Wylye 86 Alvediston 98 Barford 102 Bishopstone 109 Chilmark and Ridge 116 Flamston I26 Burcombe South and North Ugford 130 APPENDIX. Extract from the Court Rolls of the Manor of Wylye, I632 138 GLOSSARY I43 INDEX or PERSONS AND PLACES I45 INDEX or SUBJEc'rS 168 LIST or MEMBERS I73 V INTRODUCTION The surveys‘ here transcribed or abstracted were commissioned by Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, and made at his courts of survey in I631-2. They are preserved in excellent condition in the muniment room at Wilton House, thanks to the present Lord Herbert, who rescued them from oblivion. They are written in a unifonn secretary hand on sheets of paper measuring I95; by I2i- inches. Each survey is separately foliated. The first eleven bear two successive foliations. Both foliations are given in this edition, the later enclosed in round brackets. The separate surveys have been bound up into five volumes entitled thus: Surveys of Manors, I631, Vol. I; Surveys of Manors, I631, Vol. II; Surveys of Manors in Co. Wilts, I632-3 ; Survey of the Manor of Flambston I631; Burcombe Survey I632 etc. The first volume contains the first five surveys shown in the table of contents, the second the sixth to the eleventh, and the third the twelfth to the fifteenth. The first three volumes are made up as ‘open sheet ’ folios. The fourth and fifth are in normal folio form and measure I25} by 92 inches. The surveys have never been published, though Professor R. H. Tawney read some of them many years ago and, in a note preserved with the documents, recommended their publication. An edition’ of an earlier Series of Surveys of the Same estates has, however, long proved of great value to scholars ; and although the geographical coincidence of the two series is only partial, comparison between them is profitable. The Elizabethan surveys were in Latin and so printed, although an English (the estate office) version also exists. For the series here published there is no Latin version and probably none was ever made. Nor are there Surviving any draft surveys such as were compiled in the courts themselves. It is virtually certain, therefore, that these surveys consti- tute the sole surviving records of the courts held under this commission. Whether other manors were also surveyed at this time is less easy to determine. It may be that every lordship was surveyed, but it may be that only those were surveyed that were better suited for improved husbandry and rents. Of the two possibilities the former is by far the more likely. The manor, whatever it may have been in earlier ages, could now be precisely defined. According to a contemporary surveyor, ‘ A Mannor is now that which hath therunto belonging, messuages, Lands, Tenements, Rents, Seruices and Hereditaments; wherof part are Demeanes, being those which anciently and time out of minde, the Lord himselfe euer used, I I wish to express profound thanks to the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery and the Lord Herbert for their unfailing help and kindness during my study of Wiltshire agrarian history. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Tawney. Thanks are also due to Mr. Parker of Wilton estate office. 2 C. R. Straton (ed.), Surveys ofthe Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke. (London, Roxburghe Club, 2 vols-, 1909.) vii INTRODUCTION occupied and manured with the Mannor house; the residue are Free- holds, Farmes and customarie or coppihold tenements ; and these haue commonly diuers seruices besides their rents properly belonging thereunto. There is moreouer belonging to a Mannor a Court Baron. Neither do those formerly named, properly of themselues make a Mannor : For should any man at this day alott and appoint out any competent quantitie of Land, and diuide the same into demeasnes and tenement Lands in feofling Tenants in Fee of some part, and granting others by copie of Court-Roll, and perfecting the rest which before is said to belong vnto a Mannor; yet all this will not make a Mannor ; for that it is the oflice of time by long continuance to make and create the same." It is nevertheless true that ‘ A Mannor in substance is of Lands, Wood, Med- dow, Pasture and Arable: It is compounded of demeisns and seruices of long continuance ’.‘ The man who followed the course described above would have no manor ‘ but he may haue thereby a kind of seignory, a Lordship or gouernment in grosse ouer his Tennants by contract or couenant, but no Mannor’? ‘But a Mannor at this day may bee dismembred, and vtterly destroyed both in name and nature, by escheat- ing the Free-holds, and Copie-holds; for if of Freeholds or Copie-holds there are not two at the least, then are no Sutors, and if no Sutors, no Court, and consequently no Mannor, and then it may bee termed a Seignorie, which can keep no Court Baron at all.’4 In some parts of the county, e.g. in North Wiltshire, many manors were so dismembered in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but such dismember- ment was rare in Chalk Wiltshire, in the country of sheep-and-corn farming. Here the manor generally survived throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. Certainly in the seventeenth century the manor is not an institution to be disregarded. In the Chalk country, where open field husbandry survived and flourished, the manor survived and fioun'shed also. Modified and adapted to social changes, the institution was by no means weakened. True, the ties that bound the freeholders to the manor were in many cases loosened. The present surveys take only_ casual notice of the freeholders. Nevertheless the freeholders continued to owe suit of court, quit-rents and reliefs to the lord of the manor and to partici- pate in the affairs of the manorial courts, if owner-occupiers, directly, if absentee landlords, through their undertenants. The heart of the manor lay in its courts. The court baron served as the organ of agricultural regulation where this was necessary or advan- tageous. It served also as a registry for land conveyances within the manor precincts. For customary land, indeed, it was the only registry. Manorial law was a real and living body of law, depending not merely on the sworn testimony of the homage in the court baron, but also recorded in the court rolls and court books, to which reference could be made in case of doubt or dispute. Custom was not merely unchanging I Aaron Rathborne, The Surveyor (London, I616), pp. I76-7. Cf. John Norden, The Surveiors Dialogue (London, I618), p. 42. 2 Norden, op. cit., p. 35. 3 Ibz'd., p. 42. 4 Rathborne, op. cit, p. I77. viii INTRODUCTION custom. Customary law itself could and did grow and develop just as could the common law. It is not the least of the heresies to regard a society of the old type, a pre-industrial Society, as static. It was not. The economic and social fluctuations, though different in kind, were not less marked than in an industrial society, and these changes are to be seen, also, in the evolution of the customs of the village communities as formulated in the manorial courts. At the heart of the court baron lay the mutual agreement of the tenantry for husbandry. ‘ And these mutual agreements, originally founded in necessity, became, when approved by the lords, and observed for a length of time by the tenants, what are called “ Customs of Manors ", constituting the very essence of the Court Baron or Manorial Court, by which both lord and tenants were, and still are, bound ; and of which, though the lord or his steward is the judge, the tenants are the jury, the custom of the manor equally binding both." The custom of the manor, in fact, represented an equilibrium of interests. The custom for the holding of customary land from the lord represented an equilibrium between the interests of lord and tenant. The customs regulating husbandry were formed by the consent of the tenantry and the assent of the lord. In Norden’s day it was not fantastic to ask, ‘ And is not euery Mannor a little common wealth, whereof the Tenants are the members, the Land the body, and the Lord the head? ” Reading the agreement at Wylye for the floating of the meadows, it is not unrealistic to regard the lord of the manor, at this place and time, as a sort of constitutional ruler. In addition to the court baron, there were other courts held by the lords of manors on special occasions. Such was the Court of Recognition, or Curia Prima, held on the entrance of a new lord. At this court the lord became formally seized of the services of the tenantry and at his first entry received the recogrzitionem tenentium, the acknowledgment of the tenants.