Manors

A manor in English law is an estate in land to which is incident the right to hold a court termed court baron, that is to say a manorial court. The proper unit of tenure under the feudal system is the fee (or fief), on which the manor became established through the process of time, akin to the modern establishment of a "business" upon a freehold site. The manor is nevertheless often described as the basic feudal unit of tenure and is historically connected with the territorial divisions of the march, county, hundred, parish and township.

The legal theory of the origin of manors refers them to a grant from the crown of a fee from the monarch's allodial lands, as stated in the following extract from Perkins's Treatise on the laws of England:

"The beginning of a manor was when the king gave a thousand acres of land, or greater or lesser parcel of land, unto one of his subjects and his heirs, which tenure is knight service at the least. And the donee did perhaps build a mansion house upon parcel of the same land, and of 20 acres, parcel of that which remained, or of a greater or lesser parcel, before the statute of Quia emptores did enfeoff a stranger to hold of him and his heirs to plough 10 acres of land, parcel of that which remained in his possession, and did enfeoff another of another parcel thereof to go to war with him against the Scots etc., and so by continuance of time made a manor".

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