Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T16:36:37.305Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2017

CHRIS WATSON
CHRIS WATSON*
Affiliation:
chrw12@yahoo.co.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the role of manorial courts in early modern Lancashire in the regulation of mobility through order making in relation to inmates. The period under consideration is c. 1550–c. 1660. Four aspects of their operation are considered: the volume of court business dealing with issues of mobility, the quality of court orders regulating it, the place of the manor court in the topography of local governance and aspects of continuity and change in the courts’ functioning in the period. Manorial courts are shown to be active and innovative constituents of the local administrative landscape, exercising a role wider than merely the imposition of seigneurial interest and control.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , October 2017 , pp. 119 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Harrison, C., ‘Manor Courts and the Governance of Tudor England’, in Brooks, C. and Lobban, M., eds, Communities and Courts in Britain 1150 –1900 (London, 1997), pp. 43–59 Google Scholar.

2. Winchester, A. J. L., The Harvest of the Hills: Rural Life in Northern England and the Scottish Borders, 1400–1700 (Edinburgh, 2000)Google Scholar.

3. Waddell, B., ‘Governing England through the manor courts, c. 1550–1850’, Historical Journal, 55:2 (June 2012), 279–315 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Hearnshaw, F. J. C., Leet Jurisdiction in England: Especially as Illustrated by the Court Leet of Southampton (Southampton, 1908), pp. 365–7Google Scholar; Harvey, P. D. A., Manorial Records, rev. edn (London, 1999), pp. 55–7Google Scholar.

5. Winchester, A. J. L. and Straughton, E. A., ‘Sources in local history: finding and using manorial records’, Local Historian, 37 (2007), 120–5Google Scholar.

6. Snell, K. D. M., Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales 1700–1950 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whyte, N., Inhabiting the Landscape: Place Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 58, 165–6Google Scholar.

7. Kerridge, E., Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (London, 1969), pp. 1–31 Google Scholar.

8. Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 34–48.

9. Winchester, A. J. L., ‘Upland commons in northern England’, in de Moor, M., Shaw-Taylor, L. and Warde, P., eds, The Management of Common Land in North West Europe, c. 1500–1850, CORN Publication Series, 8 (Brepols, 2002), p. 51 Google Scholar.

10. 31 Elizabeth I c. 7 Against the erecting and maintaining of cottages (1589).

11. Clark, P. and Souden, D., Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London, 1987), pp. 18, 26, 33Google Scholar.

12. Beier, A. L., Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London, 1985), pp. 28–30 Google Scholar.

13. G. W. Oxley, ‘The Administration of the Old Poor Law in the West Derby Hundred of Lancashire 1601–1837’ (unpublished MA thesis, Liverpool University, 1966), pp. 125–45.

14. Styles, P., ‘The Evolution of the Law of Settlement’, in Styles, P., Studies in Seventeenth-Century West Midlands History (Kineton, 1978)Google Scholar.

15. Hindle, S., On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 300–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Taylor, J. S., ‘The impact of pauper settlement 1691–1834’, Past & Present, 73 (1976), 49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Taylor quotes Nolan, M., A Treatise of the Laws for the Relief and Settlement of the Poor (London, 1825)Google Scholar.

17. P. Styles, ‘Law of Settlement’, pp. 178–9, 181–2.

18. Holdsworth, P., ‘Manorial administration in Westmorland 1589–1693’, Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, 3rd series, 5 (2005), 137–64Google Scholar.

19. Oxley, ‘Administration of the Old Poor Law’, pp. 128–36; Hindle, On the Parish?, pp. 317–18, 325.

20. Lancashire Record Office (LRO) DDPt/22, Box 2, Rishton Court Books 1581–1660.

21. Hoskins, W. G., ‘Harvest fluctuations and English economic history, 1480–1619’, Agricultural History Review, 12 (1964), 37–8, 46Google Scholar; Walton, J. K., Lancashire: A Social History, 1558–1939 (Manchester, 1987), pp. 29–30 Google Scholar; J. Healey, ‘Marginality and Misfortune: Poverty and Social Welfare in Lancashire, c. 1630–1760’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2008), pp. 68–9.

22. Hoyle, R. W., ‘Famine as agricultural catastrophe: the crisis of 1622–4 in east Lancashire’, Economic History Review, 63:4 (2010), 974–1002 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

23. LRO DDF/158, Ulnes Walton Court Books, fol. 23.

24. LRO DDF/158, Leyland Court Baron, 13th December 1637, fols 7–9

25. LRO DDPt/22, Box 1, Billington Court Book 1602–1619, fol. 43.

26. Ibid., fol. 3.

27. Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 132–3.

28. LRO DDPt/22, Box 1, Billington Court Book 1602–1619, fol. 49.

29. Ibid., fol. 80.

30. Ibid., fol. 65.

31. Ibid., fol. 43.

32. Ibid., fol. 70.

33. Ibid., fol. 75.

34. Ibid., fol. 80.

35. C. J. Watson, ‘How did Early Modern Communities React to Poverty, Mobility and Homelessness? The Question of “Settlement” in Lancashire c. 1589–c. 1662’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Lancaster, 2009), pp. 44, 64–5.

36. Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 152–9. See clause 1.36.

37. LRO DDPt/22, Box 2, Rishton Court Books 1581–1660, Court Baron 22nd April 1652, fol. 2, r.

38. Earwaker, P. J., ed., The Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester: From the Year 1552 to the Year 1686, and From the Year 1731 to the Year 1846, 12 vols (Manchester, 1884-1890), Vol. I, pp. 192, 197, 226–7, 241, 248, 255Google Scholar; Vol. II, pp. 22, 37, 43, 51.

39. Ibid., Vol. III, p. 268; Vol. IV, p. 274.

40. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 22; Vol. IV, p. 133.

41. LRO DDF/158, Ulnes Walton Court Books, fol. 5.

42. Ibid., fol. 9.

43. Ibid., fol. 20.

44. Ibid., fol. 23.

45. LRO DDPT/22, Box 1, Billington Court Book 1652–1660.

46. Ibid., fol. 65.

47. P. Styles, ‘Law of Settlement’.

48. LRO DDPT/22, Box 1, Billington Court Book 1652–1660, item 2.

49. LRO DDHO/301, Manor of Walton le Dale orders. Containing a copy dated 1681 of ‘Nine Orders or Bilawes in Walton Court’ made in 1638.

50. LRO DDF, 158 Leyland Court Book, orders 1618–1707, fols 7–9.

51. Earwaker, ed., Manor of Manchester, Vol. III, pp. 54, 101–2, 165–6.

52. Ibid., Vol. III, p. 289; Vol. IV, pp. 249–50, 274.

53. Calculated from the maps in Smith, J. P., The Genealogists’ Atlas of Lancashire (Liverpool, 1930)Google Scholar.

54. Winchester, Angus J. L., ed., England's Landscape: The North West (London, 2006), p. 32 Google Scholar.

55. LRO DDM/7/120, Eccleston, Heskin and Euxton Court Books 1613–1621, fols 1, 3.

56. G. W. Oxley, ‘The Administration of the Old Poor Law’, p. 26.

57. Winchester, A. J. L., ‘Parish, township and tithing: landscapes of local administration in England before the nineteenth century’, Local Historian, 27 (1997), pp. 12–16 Google Scholar.

58. Cam, H. M., ‘The Community of the Vill’, in Ruffler, V. and Taylor, A. J., eds, Medieval Studies Presented to Rose Graham (Oxford, 1950), p. 1 Google Scholar.

59. LRO DDPt/22, Box 1, Billington Court Book 1602–1619, fol. 83 court on 27th April 1614.

60. Earwaker, ed., Manor of Manchester, Vol. III, p. 54.

61. LRO DDHO/310, Manor of Walton le Dale orders.

62. LRO DDPT/22, Box 1, Billington Court Book 1602–1619.

63. Shannon, Bill, ‘Approvement and Improvement in the Lowland Wastes of Early Modern Lancashire’, in Hoyle, R. W., ed., Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain (Ashgate, 2011), pp. 175–202 Google Scholar, cf. pp. 179–84; Shannon, William D., ‘Moss rooms and hell holes: the landscape of the Leyland dispute maps, 1571–1599’, Landscape History, 36:2 (2015), 49–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64. LRO QSB/1/146/50, Wigan Epiphany 1636.

65. Gritt, A. J., ‘The operation of lifeleasehold in south-west Lancashire, 1649–97’, Agricultural History Review, 53 (2005), pp. 6–7 Google Scholar.

66. LRO DDF/158, Leyland Court Baron, 13th December 1637, fols 7–9.

67. Styles, ‘Law of Settlement’, p. 181.

68. DeL, H. F.., ‘“Preventive justice”: bonds to keep the peace and for good behavior’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register, 88 (1940), 331–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69. Samaha, J. B., ‘The recognizance in Elizabethan law enforcement’, American Journal of Legal History, 25 (1981), 189, 198–9, esp. 201–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.