Rugmere, thought to have occupied part of Regentâs Park. But in fact the evidence that there ever were two absolutely distinct manors of St Pancras is rather slight; only one St Pancras manor house is ever referred to. In the ecclesiastical survey of 1251 the parish of St Pancras is reported as containing three manor houses. It seems not unreasonable to identify these as Tottenhall (near the site of the present Tolmer Square, behind Euston Road); St Pancras, which I personally believe to have stood on the east side of the Kingâs Road (St Pancras Way) near the present Agar Grove; and Cantelowes, which I believe to have stood in the same area but a little to the north and on the opposite side of the road.
Lists of the lords of the various manors, with dates, sound similarly incontrovertible, but are not actually much use in determining who was effectively in charge of what land. All three manors (or four, if we count St Pancras as two) belonged ultimately to St Paulâs Cathedral: they were granted by the Dean and Chapter to other people as âprebendsâ â the term can also be applied to the holder himself as well as to the grant made to him. But this simply meant that the revenue from those manor lands would go to the possessor and to his immediate heirs: to be a prebend, or to hold a prebend, did not necessarily mean, therefore, that one lived in the place and farmed it oneself â usually not, in fact. The manorial system had started, probably long before the Conquest, as a method of social organisation. Originally it depended on serfage, a form of slavery; the lord of the manor protected the serfs in return for their labour on his land and their allegiance to him in battle. But, as the middle ages progressed, more and more serfs gained the limited freedom of peasants; under the âcopyholdâ system, which was not finally abolished till 1922, they became tenants of the manor lands, paying a nominal rent. Thus, in time, the old intimate bond between master and man slackened, and by the fourteenth century very many villagers were in effect small tenant farmers under an absentee landlord. To be a lord of the manor was no longer necessarily to sit in a manor house presiding over the doings of a subservient body of churls: instead, manors had become commodities to be bought and sold, like industrial concerns today. Indeed the comparison between an early feudal manor held âin handâ by the lord himself, and the same manor several centuries later, is like that between the mediaeval workshop, with a master presiding personally over a handful of journeymen and apprentices, and a present-day public company in which anyone can hold shares and which may be only one part of a much larger combine anyway.
Thus the same ground landlord might own more than one manor in the same area (as did St Paulâs); or two manors adjacent to one another might, further down the scale of control, be in the effective possession of the same family. This would naturally lead to a blurring of distinction between them. Or, alternatively, old manors might be split up into two or more smaller holdings (as seems to have happened originally with Kenwood at Highgate, and Kentish Town, or indeed with the two manors of St Pancras). Nor were men who had simply rented manors, or married into them, averse to assuming the role, if not the actual title, of âthe lordâ. Moreover a district might include a substantial freehold house belonging to a notable, who might well be the nearest thing around to an actual lord.
Nor, indeed, is the traditional school history book image of a manor house, as a substantial residence set squarely in the centre of the manorial lands, necessarily realistic. In many areas, manorial holdings were split up, because of buying and selling and marriages and bequests, into several segments. Nor was the manor house where one existed (which was by no means always the case) necessarily
Lists of the lords of the various manors, with dates, sound similarly incontrovertible, but are not actually much use in determining who was effectively in charge of what land. All three manors (or four, if we count St Pancras as two) belonged ultimately to St Paulâs Cathedral: they were granted by the Dean and Chapter to other people as âprebendsâ â the term can also be applied to the holder himself as well as to the grant made to him. But this simply meant that the revenue from those manor lands would go to the possessor and to his immediate heirs: to be a prebend, or to hold a prebend, did not necessarily mean, therefore, that one lived in the place and farmed it oneself â usually not, in fact. The manorial system had started, probably long before the Conquest, as a method of social organisation. Originally it depended on serfage, a form of slavery; the lord of the manor protected the serfs in return for their labour on his land and their allegiance to him in battle. But, as the middle ages progressed, more and more serfs gained the limited freedom of peasants; under the âcopyholdâ system, which was not finally abolished till 1922, they became tenants of the manor lands, paying a nominal rent. Thus, in time, the old intimate bond between master and man slackened, and by the fourteenth century very many villagers were in effect small tenant farmers under an absentee landlord. To be a lord of the manor was no longer necessarily to sit in a manor house presiding over the doings of a subservient body of churls: instead, manors had become commodities to be bought and sold, like industrial concerns today. Indeed the comparison between an early feudal manor held âin handâ by the lord himself, and the same manor several centuries later, is like that between the mediaeval workshop, with a master presiding personally over a handful of journeymen and apprentices, and a present-day public company in which anyone can hold shares and which may be only one part of a much larger combine anyway.
Thus the same ground landlord might own more than one manor in the same area (as did St Paulâs); or two manors adjacent to one another might, further down the scale of control, be in the effective possession of the same family. This would naturally lead to a blurring of distinction between them. Or, alternatively, old manors might be split up into two or more smaller holdings (as seems to have happened originally with Kenwood at Highgate, and Kentish Town, or indeed with the two manors of St Pancras). Nor were men who had simply rented manors, or married into them, averse to assuming the role, if not the actual title, of âthe lordâ. Moreover a district might include a substantial freehold house belonging to a notable, who might well be the nearest thing around to an actual lord.
Nor, indeed, is the traditional school history book image of a manor house, as a substantial residence set squarely in the centre of the manorial lands, necessarily realistic. In many areas, manorial holdings were split up, because of buying and selling and marriages and bequests, into several segments. Nor was the manor house where one existed (which was by no means always the case) necessarily
Similar Books
