Manorialism - History

History

The first known scheme similar to manorialism was seen in ancient China in 365 BCE, during the Warring States Period. Shang Yang, a scholar from the Legalist School, in his book "The Book of Lord Shang, refers to several measures taken by the state. The aristocracy system was abolished, with all peasants granted citizenship rights. They were forced to resettle in new clusters, where they focused on increasing agricultural output. Meritocracy was practiced in the whole state, with peasants, soldiers and officers receiving due rewards according to their contributions, regardless of their backgrounds. Moreover, tough and strict laws were imposed as well. For peasants, Qin maintained vigilant mutual surveillance over one another under threat of death, with draconian punishments being meted out for the slightest of offenses, and even nobles and royals were not spared. After decades, the reforms strengthened Qin economically and militarily and transformed it into a highly centralized state with an efficient administrative system. He changed the administration of the state through an emphasis on meritocracy and devolvement of power from the nobility. After Duke Xiao's death, King Huiwen of Qin and his successors retained the reformed systems and they helped to lay the foundation for Qin's eventual unification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC. It's said by Mao Zedong, the founder of modern People's Republic of China, that the economic and administration system of Qin Dynasty have been retained through all the dynasties in China from then on.

The word derives from traditional inherited divisions of the countryside, reassigned as local jurisdictions known as manors or seigneuries; each manor being subject to a lord (French seigneur), usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a higher lord (see Feudalism). The lord held a manorial court, governed by public law and local custom. Not all territorial seigneurs were secular; bishops and abbots also held lands that entailed similar obligations.

By extension, the word manor is sometimes used in England to mean any home area or territory in which authority is held, often in a police or criminal context.

In the generic plan of a medieval manor from Shepherd's Historical Atlas, the strips of individually worked land in the open field system are immediately apparent. In this plan, the manor house is set slightly apart from the village, but equally often the village grew up around the forecourt of the manor, formerly walled, while the manor lands stretched away outside, as still may be seen at Petworth House. As concerns for privacy increased in the 18th century, manor houses were often located a farther distance from the village. For example, when a grand new house was required by the new owner of Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire, in the 1830s, the site of the existing manor house at the edge of its village was abandoned for a new one, isolated in its park, with the village out of view.

In an agrarian society, the conditions of land tenure underlie all social or economic factors. There were two legal systems of pre-manorial landholding. One, the most common, was the system of holding land "allodially" in full outright ownership. The other was a use of precaria or benefices, in which land was held conditionally (the root of the English word "precarious").

To these two systems, the Carolingian monarchs added a third, the aprisio, which linked manorialism with feudalism. The aprisio made its first appearance in Charlemagne's province of Septimania in the south of France, when Charlemagne had to settle the Visigothic refugees, who had fled with his retreating forces, after the failure of his Zaragoza expedition of 778. He solved this problem by allotting "desert" tracts of uncultivated land belonging to the royal fisc under direct control of the emperor. These holdings aprisio entailed specific conditions. The earliest specific aprisio grant that has been identified was at Fontjoncouse, near Narbonne (see Lewis, links). In former Roman settlements, a system of villas, dating from Late Antiquity, was inherited by the medieval world.