CHAPTER III 

 THE MANOR AND THE VILLAGE 



IN the Xllth and Xlllth centuries, the manorial 



system prevailed in England, built up by the Normans 



on the foundations of the old estates, a 



General structure forming a wall and roof, as it were, 



character of ... ' 



the manors, over the democratic English village com- 

 munities. In these centuries England may, 

 then, be pictured as divided up into little manorial 

 kingdoms, in the main self-supporting, each with its 

 own governor the lord of the manor and its own 

 rules and customs. In some cases the manor would 

 take the form of a number of small or large holdings 

 lying in many places, a widely scattered estate ; in 

 others, the manor stretched over a great area, like the 

 Bishop of Winchester's manor of East Meon in Hamp- 

 shire, with its fifteen tithings or village communities 

 and 24,000 acres of land within its . boundaries, while 

 some manors extended to twenty or thirty acres only. 

 But the manor in its most characteristic form would 

 be a compact area coinciding with the ' vill,' * as the 

 village community was called at that time. Manors 

 were often divided one from another by broad stretches 

 of woods and waste lands, or perhaps by great forests 

 in royal ownership, while the roads by which they 



1 See Appendix, p. 163. 

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