Manorial System
The manorial system
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Jersey is an island rich in manor houses, but to frame a definition of a Jersey manor is surprisingly difiicult.
Dwelling of a seigneur
The English term ‘lord of the manor’ is a familiar one, to which the nearest approximation in the Channel Islands is the seigneur of a fief; so a manor house in Jersey ought to mean the dwelling of a seigneur.
Architectural historians today, especially in France, are apt to define a ‘seigneurial residence’ in typological terms, by how many boxes it ticks on a list of features considered to be of seigneurial character. However, this definition, if applied in Jersey, would confer seigneurial status on many houses whose ownership has never been connected with the seigneury of a fief.
In an island where the feudal system survived until modern times and the system of fiefs was part of the bedrock of society, the primary test of a manor has always been that its ownership runs with the tenure of a fief, or has done so for a significant time in its history.
By that test there are, or have been in the past, between 30 and 40 manor houses in the island. Some are large and grand and convincingly seigneurial, but the majority can be matched in size and typology by other houses that are not manors. A few, such as Fernhill in St Helier and The Elms in St Mary, have forgotten that they were ever manors at all, never using the title despite centuries of association with a fief.
There are also houses such as Hamptonne in St Lawrence and Beau Desert in St Saviour, which are neither called manors nor associated with a territorial fief, but whose ownership confers franchises of a seigneurial character. Houses without feudal connections which have acquired the title of ‘manor’ in modern times do not come into the picture, but even here it is hard to draw the line: the manors of Mont a l’Abbé in St Helier and Malorey in St Lawrence have been so called for centuries, yet neither seems to have had a fief attached to it.
In England, one would not expect to find 30 manors in an area of forty—five square miles. The reason for the difference is that the medieval English settlement pattern was based on the compact or ‘nucleated’ village surrounded by open fields: typically, though not always, this coincided with a single manor to form the basic unit of rural organization.
In Jersey the nucleated village was unknown. Old houses are not clustered near the country parish churches: where the church today stands on the edge of what amounts to a village (as at St Martin and to a lesser extent Grouville and St Peter), few of the houses are older than the late 18th or early 19th century.
Jersey's settlement pattern
Nor is there any correlation between church and manor house sites. Jersey’s ancient settlement pattern is of individual farms spread over the countryside, each surrounded by its own fields, and the island was divided into a great number of fiefs, none of them large by English or French standards and some very small.
To speak of fiefs raises the subject of feudalism. This is a notoriously difficult word to define, partly because it is a retrospective term used by different people to mean different things, but broadly it was system of society based on a hierarchy of personal relationships linked to the tenure of land.
In the Middle Ages, land was not owned outright but ‘held’ from a feudal superior or lord in return for certain obligations. This is called the principle of dependent tenure, and everyone who held land from a lord in this way was called a tenant (in either French or English) from the Latin verb tenere, (to hold).
The principle operated at two levels. The upper level comprised all the holdings classed in England as lordships or fees, and in France as seigneuries or fiefs. These ranged from the baronies (or ‘honours’) held by the great nobles of the realm, with their executive and judicial organization modelled on that of the King’s court, down to individual manors and small fiefs like those of the Channel Islands. At the lower or agricultural level, the men who actually worked the land held their individual tenements from the lord of the manor.
There was also an ill—defined ‘middle class’ of tenants, sometimes called vavassors, who enjoyed certain franchises that the peasants did not, and whose holdings differed from true fiefs in being divisible between heirs.
At the upper level, the most important tenurial obligation was military service. In England, where Norman feudalism was introduced after the Conquest, the King granted huge estates to barons in return for the provision of a quota of knights armed and equipped for war.
These barons were known as tenants in chief, because they held their estates directly, or ‘in chief’ (in rapite), from the King. Out of these great estates the barons granted smaller fiefs, or manors, to dependent lords, generally for a proportion of the total knight service due on the barony.
Subinfeudation
This process, called subinfeudation, could be repeated several times to create a chain of intermediate or ‘mesne’ lordships down to the level at which a knight was granted a piece of the baronial estate sufficient to support him and pay for his equipment.
This is called a ‘knight’s fee’ or fief de haubert, from the hauberk or coat of chain mail worn by Norman knights in battle. Not all knights' fees, however, were held through a mesne lord: some were held in chief from the King. Nor were all flefs at this level held by military service. Some were held by an alternative tenure called sergeanty, which carried the duty of rendering a personal service to the King.
Many historians restrict the term ‘feudalism’ to this upper level of tenures by knight service or sergeanty, leaving the relations between the lords of manors and their agricultural tenants to be treated as a separate system called manorialism. This was the view of leading authorities on English feudalism for most of the 20th century and also of some influential French writers, notably F L Ganshof (1944).
More recently Elizabeth Brown in America and Susan Reynolds in England have argued that the idea of feudalism as generally understood should be discarded altogether, as a post-medieval construct that does not reflect the evidence of medieval sources but distorts it.
Evidence in the Channel Islands does not appear to support either of these views, fitting much better with what Marc Bloch wrote in his classic work La société feodale, published in 1939. He accepted that the manor itself was not a feudal institution, that the memorial system was distinct from military feudalism and probably of older origin; but he polnted out that ‘the manorial System was absorbed into the feudal organization of society and acquired feudal characteristics which it retained long after military feudalism became obsolete’.
That sentence might have been written specifically about the system of fiefs and manors in Jersey. So there are two ‘levels’ of feudalism. In Norman law all holdings at the upper level, from great baronial estates down to individual knights’ fees, were classed as ‘noble’ lands (biens nobles or fiefs nobles).
At the lower or manorial level, men of the peasant class held individual tenements and parcels of land from the lord of a fief or manor in return for services of an agricultural or domestic nature.
These holdings in Norman law were called terres roturieres. The two types of holding were governed by different laws of succession: terres roturieres were subject to division between heirs, terres nobles were not, as long as they remained in the male line.
The vavasseurs, the ‘intermediate’ class of tenants mentioned earlier, were free of the agricultural services owed by the peasantry, so they shared the title of franc tenant with the holders of the fiefs, but their holdings differed from a fief noble in being divisible between heirs in the normal way.
In Jersey the term vavasseur is not often used, but one sometimes comes across holdings of this type as franches teneures within fiefs; some of them rose in status to become fiefs in their own right, others vanished without trace.
Fief de la Reine
The King/Duke did not grant all the land in either his realm of England or his duchy of Normandy to tenants in chief, but retained an extensive demesne of his own, In England, much of this was occupied by the great royal hunting forests. In Jersey, what is left of the ancient demesne of the dukes of Normandy extends through parts of ten of our twelve parishes and is now called the Fief de Sa Majesté or Fief de la Reine.
The position in Guernsey is different: the whole island was divided at some time about 1020 between two Norman lords, Néel of the Cotentin and Anquetil of the Bessin, so no ancient demesne was retained by the Duke. What is called the ‘Fief le Roi’ in Guernsey today is not a remnant of the ancient ducal demesne but part of the Cotentin half of the island that later came back into the King’s hands by escheat.
In Jersey, private fiefs confiscated by the Crown at different times were not incorporated into the demesne but administered separately, with their own courts and officials; the same applies to the many fiefs originally held by Norman bishops and abbots, which were confiscated by Henry V in 1413.
Although English examples are cited above when describing feudal tenures in general, the feudalism of the Channel Islands is purely Norman. The islands became part of Normandy in the tenth century, though not in 933 as is usually said. Whatever lands were granted to Rollo in 924 and to his son William Longsword in 933 had been lost by 940, and it was not until 966 that the true foundations of the Norman state were laid by William’s son, Richard the Fearless.
Even then, the islands’ inclusion in it will have been largely theoretical. Independent Scandinavian settlement in the Cotentin and the islands had been taking place throughout the century, but they probably did not come under effective rule from Rouen before the turn of the millennium.
When feudal tenure first appeared in the islands is impossible to say, because there are very few relevant records from before 1100 and none earlier than 1025. But our 13th and 14th—century records show clearly that both Jersey and Guernsey at that time had systems of feudal organisation and dependent tenure that were obviously long—established and conform to Bloch’s model of an integrated feudal society.
In Guernsey the two great fiefs of the Cotentin and the Bessin had undergone a complicated process of division, escheat, regrant and sub— infeudation that had left much of the original Fief du Cotentin in the hands of the King; the Fief du Bessin became known as the Fief le Comte after the original grantee’s descendants were created earls of Chester. Much of it passed to the abbey 0f Mont Saint—Michel, and the rest was divided into numerous smaller fiefs and sub-fiefs.
Agricultural tenants
In Jersey, most of the King’s demesne was held by agricultural tenants under a system of bouvées each measuring 24 vergées (equating to 10 2/3 English acres). This must reflect a planned allocation of holdings at some early time: how early is not known, but the bouvée system was certainly in existence before the mid—12th century and was disintegrating through constant subdivision of the holdings by the time of the only full account of it in the Extente of 1331.
Outside the King’s demesne, Jersey was covered with a network of fiefs of varying size and status. A few pieces of what is usually called ‘allodial’ land, owing no dues or services to the Crown or to any fief, have survived into modern times, presumably from a pre—feudal era: there is an area of it in St Martin, between the windmill and the Arsenal.
It is now fairly certain, too, that the fief of St Ouen originated as an allodial Viking land—take of the ninth or early tenth century. There is no obvious evidence as to whether any other fiefs could have originated in this way, but medieval references to allodial tenure in Jersey are so rare that it had presumably all but disappeared before our records begin.
The most striking thing about Jersey’s fiefs is their sheer number. Charles Stevens recorded the names of at least 245, though probably not all existed at the same time; the locations of about 150 are more or less certainly known. Some were very small, consisting of only a few fields.
In St Helier, as the town expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were tiny fiefs consisting of just a single block of houses between streets. Some fiefs consist of two or more disjointed pieces, though it is not clear why.
In England, where baronies tended to consist of lands scattered over a wide area, this is said to have been done to prevent the barons from building compact territorial power bases for rebellion against the King, but this can hardly have been the case here.
Possibly some of these fiefs were not grants out of the royal/ducal demesne, but pre—feudal holdings that had been acquired piecemeal and later feudalized.
The only fief in the Channel Islands that seems to have been held by knight service in the Middle Ages was St Ouen: certainly it is the only one known historically as le Fief Haubert. It is often said to be the remnant of a Norman barony, but this is a mistake. It is now known from medieval French sources that the combined fief of Carteret and St Ouen formed only one knight’s fee, of which, after the separation of the islands from Normandy in 1204, the part in Jersey was reckoned as two thirds and the part at Carteret as one third.
Castle guard
In Jersey the service took the form of castle guard: the seigneur of St Ouen was required in time of war to serve the King under arms with two other horsemen and horses for two thirds of the customary service period of 40 days each year.
The other major Channel Island fiefs were held by sergeanty, which, as has been seen, Was a tenure equal in status to knight service. In England, sergeanty services recorded from Oxfordshire in the 13th century included bearing the King’s standard in war, ceremonial duties at his coronation, services to do with hunting or falconry, and the like. One man held by usher service with the special duty of guarding the court strumpets.
In Guernsey the seigneur of the Fief de Sausmarez had to act as cup—bearer to the King when he visited the island; this is a classic example of a sergeanty tenure, as was the service owed by the Jersey seigneurs of Rozel, Samares and Les Augres of riding into the sea to meet the King when he visited the island and acting as his butler while he was here. At Samares the service lapsed, but the seigneurs of Rozel and Les Augrés still form part of the welcoming party to greet the Queen when she steps ashore from the boat or off the plane. Trinity owed the lesser service of presenting the Visiting monarch with a pair of mallard ducks.
A few of the smaller fiefs owed minor services such as the payment of a pair of spurs or keeping a prison in which to guard prisoners awaiting trial by the Royal Court. But these were exceptional, and on most fiefs the principal due was a modest annual rent to the Crown in either money or wheat.
About 20 fiefs of varying status also owed suit of court, the duty of the seigneur to answer for the fief at the Assise d’Heritage. Originally held at the beginning of each of the three annual law terms, later reduced to two, this was the sitting at which the Royal Court assumed its ancient feudal role as the court of the King’s demesne in the Island. Today it is held only once a year and its focus has changed, but the seigneurs are still required to attend.
At the lower or ‘manorial’ level a typical fief was organised like a barony in miniature. Part of the land was reserved as the lord’s demesne, which became the manorial estate; the rest was parcelled out to the men who actually worked the land. Each of these agricultural tenants originally had a holding just sufficient to support a living from it, and this holding would pass to the tenant’s heirs when he died, unless he had disposed of it in his lifetime, which almost all Jersey tenants were free to do.
The rents and dues taken by the seigneur from the tenants varied according to the custom of the fief. One of the most common was poulage, a fixed rent payable in poultry, eggs or loaves of bread. This is thought to have originated as a tax on the houses of the tenants.
Certain lands were liable to champart, which was the seigneur’s right to every twelfth sheaf of grain or flax: where this was due, the tenants had to assemble the sheaves, cart them, stack them and thatch them. On most fiefs the tenants also owed cartage of wine, firewood and bay for the seigneur, and of materials for the repair and maintenance of the manorial mill.
Provision of prevot
Another important duty owed by the tenants of most Jersey fiefs was to provide the seigneur each year with the services of a prévot, who acted as chief executive officer of the feudal court and collected the court fines and seigneurial rents.
Originally the tenants chose the prévot from among themselves: the fact that such an important official was elected by those over whom he exercised his authority shows that their status was higher than that of men who had to obey a nominated prévot, as was usual on the Continent.
Later the system was changed, and the holders of certain tenements on the fief became responsible in rotation for doing the service or hiring a man to do it for them.
As well as these services due by the tenants for their lands, the seigneurs had franchises that extended over the fief as a whole. The most important of these was droit de cour et usage, the right to hold a court of the tenants.
This was a general right of feudal and manorial lords both in England (where the manorial court or ‘hallmoot’ was of Anglo—Saxon origin) and in France. Nearly every major Jersey fief had a court, and so did many lesser ones including some of the very smallest.
The nature of these courts is widely misunderstood. People imagine the seigneur presiding in his court and ordering his tenants to be hanged or flogged for petty offences. This is nonsense. No seigneur could sit in his own court: he merely appointed the seneschal or judge who presided, and the criminal jurisdiction of these courts, in later times at least, was very limited.
It is true that a few of our principal fiefs had the right of gallows, but this had nothing to do with seigneurial jurisdiction. It meant that if a tenant of the fief was convicted of felony by the Royal Court, he was hanged on the fief and not on the public gallows in St Helier.
The seigneurial courts dealt with fief business, such as administering commons, collecting seigneurial dues and receiving the written declarations of each tenant’s land, called aveux, to which the old practice of doing homage to the seigneur had been commuted; and they dealt with a steady stream of civil actions between tenants.
Love of litigation is a well—known Norman characteristic which was fully shared by Jersey people. The earliest surviving rolls of the manorial courts in the 16th century show them handling a variety of everyday disputes whose details provide a rich and largely untapped source for the social history of the time.
Perhaps the clearest example of how manorial feudalism originally worked, to the mutual advantage of seigneur and tenant, is the franchise called suit at mill (secquemotte). This was another very general feudal right possessed by all of the more important Jersey fiefs, though some did not have a mill of their own but had to share in the profit from a mill on another fief.
King's mills
The King also had a number of mills on the Fief du Roi. Most of the mills were water mills in the valleys: the windmill, which first appeared in Europe in the late twelfth century, came to Jersey quite early. The seigneur of Samares had one in 1218 — but only a few are recorded here in the Middle Ages. No one but the King or a seigneur could have a mill, and no new mill could be built except by royal grant.
The tenants of the fief had to bring their corn to the mill to be ground, paying the seigneur a charge for grinding it, and they also had to supply materials for the upkeep of the mill. If the mill was burned down or otherwise destroyed, the seigneur had to rebuild it at his own expense, with the tenants carting the materials.
Mills were often burned during invasions and one is recorded as being ruined by a gale, implying that at least some of them were built of wood in those days, though John McCormack considers the granite windmill at Rozel to date from the 13th century.
Milling was very profitable and an important source of revenue to the King and the seigneurs, many of whom farmed out the franchise; but on the other hand the system guaranteed the tenants a vital adjunct to their subsistence farming with the capital expenditure born by their lord.
A similar mutual benefit can be seen in the seigneurs’ right to impound stray animals, which helped the tenants by preventing damage to their crops. Under the medieval system of agriculture, whereby tenants were allocated unfenced strips of land to cultivate within large open fields, crops had always to be protected from stray cattle.
All fiefs enjoying the franchise of verp, as it was known, had a special officer called a messier to attend to the business of guarding the crops, capturing the strays, maintaining the pound and collecting the fines imposed on the beasts’ owners for allowing them to wander. This was much more efficient than leaving each tenant to guard his own strips within the open fields.
Rights to shipwrecks
Other franchises were more one—sided. The right to wreck of the sea cast up on the foreshore was essentially another example of custody of property gone astray, and the original owner had a year and a day in which to come and claim the goods; but one wonders how easy it was for such a claim to be proved in the seigneurial court.
The right was guarded jealously by the seigneurs. The Assize Roll of 1309 records a case in involving some foreign sailors who, making for a safe haven in rough weather, found two casks of wine floating in the sea and took them into their boat before coming to land within the St Helier portion of the fief of Samares (now the Fief de la Fosse).
The Prior of St Helier, who from his eyrie on the islet had evidently seen the sailors taking the casks on board, sent a man ashore to induce them to put back to sea on the next tide and come back to shore on the Fief du Prieur, so that he could claim the wreck. The sailors duly put back to sea; but, being strangers to the island with no knowledge of fief boundaries, they went a little too far to the west and came to shore not on the Fief du Prieur but on the Fief de Méleches.
The justices in eyre were thus treated to a four—way argument between the King’s attorney, the Prior and the seigneurs of La Fosse and Méleches as to which of them should have the wreck. In the end the King got it but the Prior was allowed to keep one cask, paying the King and the other two seigneurs 20 sols each.
Other prerogatives for which the tenants got no benefit in return were the exclusive right of the seigneur to hunt game on the fief; the tax on the fishery for congers called esperquerie; and the right to the enjoyment for a year and a day of the property of a tenant who died without direct heirs; known later as the année de jouissance or annee de succession.
This was the last major seigneurial right to survive, and by the 19th century it had become an anachronism that provoked much resentment. Eventually a law was passed enabling property buyers to extinguish it by paying the seigneur a small percentage of the purchase price, but it was not finally abolished until 1966.
Droit de Colombier
Perhaps the most oppressive of all seigneurial rights was the droit de colombier, the exclusive right of a seigneur to have on his fief a stone dovecote in which to breed pigeons for his own benefit. Since the pigeons fed mainly on the tenants’ crops, this was a crippling burden on agriculture: the colombier at Diélament Manor in Trinity, for example, rebuilt in 1573, had accommodation for over 2,000 birds.
Whether the right was an ancient one is not clear. It is not mentioned in the Ancienne Coutume de Normandie, and our foremost authority on Jersey feudal tenures, Guy de Gruchy, could find no reference to it in the 11th or 12th—century records of either Normandy or the Channel Islands, so it may not have become established here until after 1200.
Norman law in the late 13th century restricted the privilege to fiefs of the higher class, but in Jersey it is seen from various entries in the Assize Roll of 1309 and the Extente of 1331 that lesser landowners who erected a colombier on their land were sometimes allowed to keep it on paying an annual rent to the Crown. A distinction between round and square colombiers was strictly observed, mention of them in acts of the Royal Court nearly always specifying the shape.
Since all those of the principal manors are round, these were evidently the higher in status. Only Samares preserves its medieval colombier more or less intact, but several others are known to have been rebuilt in past centuries and can be assumed to replace medieval predecessors.
Droit de seigneur
No survey of seigneurial rights can avoid mentioning the notorious droit de seigneur that supposedly allowed the lord to bed the bride or daughter of a tenant on her wedding night.
Though this is dignified by a Latin title of jus primae noctis, there is no evidence that it ever existed in law. If it was really a custom on the Continent in the 18th century, when Beaumarchais made it central to the plot of Le Mariage de Figaro, it was a gross example of feudalism’s post— medieval decadence. Leopold Delisle, the acknowledged master of Norman feudal studies, could find no evidence for it in the whole of Normandy, and it was certainly never a right ofJersey seigneurs.
It is true that the Assize Roll of 1299 records Sir Drogo de Barentin of Rozel sending his men out to seize local women and bring them to the manor for the pleasure of him and his brother, but this was evidently not a customary right: it was regarded by the tenants as an outrage and provoked a flood of complaints to the Justices.
The due called noces, collected in later times by the courts of certain fiefs, was merely a fee paid by a tenant to the seigneur for leave to marry (or give a daughter in marriage) out of the fief — the equivalent of the English ‘merchet’. Even that seems degrading enough to our eyes: evidence suggests that it was not an ancient right in jersey but a late introduction from France.
The tenants of the medieval Jersey seigneurs, and the King’s tenants on the Fief du Roi, were the largest class of the Island’s population, the ancestors of the farmers who formed the backbone of our society in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is important to stress that, whatever the burdens placed on them by the various seigneurial rights and dues, they were essentially free peasants and not serfs.
Serfdom, though common in most parts of France, was rare in Normandy and unknown in the Channel Islands. In 1937 John Le Patourel described our manorial tenants as tenants in villeinage, but this is misleading. The English villein was a class of serf, bound to his holding and unable to dispose of it without his lord’s consent, whereas all but a very few Jersey tenants could dispose of their holdings at will.
The vilains of Normandy were of higher status than English Villeins, but even the relatively free Norman Vilain was not really comparable to a Jersey manorial tenant, because he owed extensive agricultural and domestic services called corvées, of which there is no mention in our medieval records.
Tenants disputed liability to service
When in post—medieval times the Jersey seigneurs tried to exact services such as day work on the land and building work on the manor houses, the tenants fiercely disputed the claims and insisted that their ancestors had never owed such services.
There was a major dispute over this between seigneur and tenants at Samares in 1608, and another at St Ouen a hundred years later. It is clear that the seigneurs were abusing their position at their tenants’ expense: the great vice of feudalism was that it lent itself so readily to this.
In conclusion, this account returns briefly to the typology of manor houses. Three features regarded as typical of a seigneurial residence in France are a private chapel, a gatehouse or porter’s lodge, and either a free—standing colombier or a tour—fuie, a staircase tourelle with a few rows of pigeon—holes at the top of it.
Several of our principal manors had chapels, but there were at least as many in houses that were not manorial. John McCormack in his book Channel Island Churches lists at least seven apparently domestic chapels that seem to have no manorial connection.
At La Tourelle in St Martin is a house that has never been described as a manor and has no known link with a fief, yet it retains an original tour-fuie, and a view of the house in 1841 shows that the yard in front was approached through a perfectly preserved medieval gatehouse, long since demolished.
The only gatehouse to survive in Jersey in anything like its original form is the one at La Haule Manor, dating from the 15th century and now converted into a cottage. La Haule also had a chapel and it is described as a manor house in 1430, but it does not seem to have had any connection with a fief at that date, so perhaps it wasjust a ‘manor’ by pretension and typology. Only later did it become united with the Franc Fief in St Brélade, of which it has been the manor house ever since.
Nestling in the countryside inland is the house that was held with the Franc Fief before 1590. Not much larger than a cottage, its building sequence is an enigma: the frontage 0f squared and ashlared blocks of red granite apparently dates from 1614, but the front door arch with its recessed inner order of voussoirs is a smaller version of those a century older in St Helier and St Brelade churches, and the wing at the back, possibly the chamber block of an earlier house, contains an arch of the late 15th or early 16th century.
Its most intriguing feature is the cellar, with two tiny windows, under the main room in the front part of the house. Cellars are very rare in old Jersey houses, but the seigneur of this fief owed the service of providing a prison for offenders awaiting trial at the Royal Court. Presumably this cellar is where he kept them. If one accepts that this little house was a manor by definition, it shows just hoW modest the manor house of a secondary fief in Jersey could be.
