ts were created to oversee the performance of those duties. On the highest level, the great lords provided honorial courts to settle disputes among their titled vassals, the knights and lesser nobility. (Note: Norman vassals - the Saxon nobility were disenfranchised within a decade of the Conquest). The principal concern of such courts was the land grants that the vassals received in return for military service: the courts oversaw the rules of inheritance, marriage, and other matters that pertained to the land grants. The lawyerly proverb, "Justice is great profit," describes the prevailing incentive of feudal law (Bennett 197).
While the English nobility had their common law evolve through the honorial courts, every vassal lord had his own manorial court to administer, whatever his position on the social scale (Hone 14). "He owes suit of court from three weeks to three weeks," feudal English law decreed (Bennett 195), and every manor had a local court with jurisdiction over the manor's serfs and freemen. Thus was born "manorialism."
Manorialism, also known as "seignorialism," was the economic, social and administrative system that prevailed in the Middle Ages. As practiced in England, manorialism had its origins in 4th century continental Europe, reached its zenith in the 11th and 12th centuries, and then began a long decline that ended in only with the dawning of the Industrial Age; on the continent, it lingered in central and eastern Europe until the very late 19th century. Although manorialism varied from region to region - indeed, from manor to manor (Bennett 199) - it was essentially a system whereby the land, or manor, was owned by the lord via king's grant and was parceled out to individual peasants who farmed it. In return, payments were made to the lord in the form of crops, services and, as the non-urban economy grew more sophisticated, money.
Manorialism existed alongside feudalism, but should not be ...