What is a manor?
PDA Harvey in Manorial Records gives three meanings of the word manor; “a residence”, “a unit of estate administration” and “a piece of landed property with tenants over whom the landlord exercised rights of jurisdiction in a private court”. It is the third definition which has been applied in compiling the Manorial Documents Register. Many of the secondary sources listed in the general bibliography provide further definitions. For the purposes of the Manorial Documents Register the definitive proof of the existence of a manor is the survival of records produced by the manorial court. The Register notes the location of manorial records and its purpose is to guide users to the location of these records. The manor name information within the Manorial Documents Register is not designed to be a definitive list of all manors which existed but only records the names of manors for which documents were, or may have been, created in order to enable those documents to be entered on the Register.
