Lords, tenants and attitudes to manorial officeholding, c.1300-c.1600

Recent revisionist scholarship has challenged the view that the relationship between lords and tenants in late medieval England was inherently conflictual. However the consequences of this revisionism for the position of manorial officials, individuals drawn from a lord’s tenants to help run his manor, have not yet been fully considered. Using the surviving court rolls of three case-study manors, this article demonstrates that tenants were invested in an effectively functioning system of officers, which met their needs in the manor court. This led them to police both officials and the wider community independently of seigneurial pressure to ensure officers performed their work correctly. This ‘positive’ attitude of tenants towards manorial officeholding in turn has greater ramifications in explaining the persistence of manorial structures into the sixteenth century and implying that the exercise of manorial lordship was as much collaborative as conflictual.