Governing England Through the Manor Courts, 1550–1850

Coroners’ inquest juries in sixteenth-century England

“…They characterise manorial jurors as 'established inhabitants', 'drawn primarily from the principal landholding tenants of the manor', incarnating an 'emerging village elite' or 'established inhabitants of middling status', 'the heads of established tenant families', 'yeomen, husbandmen, and local craftsmen and traders' rather than 'powerful and highly educated men' or 'the landless poor'; in village terms, 'small oligarchies of elite men', but acting under the constraint that 'other villagers might hold them to account'. 21 A persuasive recent formulation, based on analysis of three contrasting manors over three centuries, is that elements of oligarchy and wider participation could coexist and could fluctuate over time in different ways in different places, and that the sixteenth century saw no decisive move to a narrowing of representation and in some places a widening. 22 Analysts of courts and inquisitions of all types have understandably called for more research into jurors.…”

‘To Beare the Towne Harmles’: Manorial Regulation of Mobility and Settlement in Early Modern Lancashire

“…2 More recently, Waddell has stressed the importance of the manor court in local governance, its resilience in a period of change and its relative neglect by historians of the period. 3 Contemporaries and Tudor parliaments did not view them as defunct. Of fifty-one statutes relating to leet jurisdiction identified between 1225 and 1887, twenty date from the sixteenth century.…”