A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



It has been argued that the organization and definition of manorial 

 courts was by no means early, but followed and imitated that of the criminal 

 jurisdiction of the sheriff. That originally, in short, there had been but 

 a single court or halmote for all the tenants of the manor. 1 Now if we apply 

 this theory to the bishop's estates which the rapid development of his 

 sovereignty and the machinery for its application in the twelfth century 

 would have left in a direct and proprietary relation to him, and remember 

 the absence in the bishopric of any normalizing fiscal system, we may well 

 regard the episcopal halmote courts as a case of arrested development. The 

 great estate, as apart from the great franchise, would continue, in principle at 

 least, to be administered as a single whole. 



Thus in the bishopric the financial force which contributed to the 

 formation of the manor did not exist and the judicial element had been 

 reduced to a minimum. It had, however, a certain importance. In practice 

 it must have been convenient to hold the halmote from place to place on the 

 plan which we have seen was customary in the fourteenth century. Such an 

 arrangement would naturally take account of any pre-existent grouping or 

 arrangement of vills, such as a parent community and its offshoots, or a 

 cluster of intercommoning vills, or the like. Where a court was held for a 

 number of vills that already had some principle of cohesion they would 

 obviously be drawn more closely together, for the business of the halmote 

 was almost as much administrative as judicial, and all sorts of common affairs 

 were regulated there. Then, following the custom of the kingdom, such 

 groups with newly developed or intensified solidarity might in the course of 

 the thirteenth century come naturally if not very accurately to be described 

 as manors. 



If this hypothesis prove acceptable, it will still be necessary to account 

 for the economic, as we have endeavoured to account for the judicial, forma- 

 tion of the episcopal manors, to show what earlier element of cohesion had 

 held the clusters of vills together. Here, fortunately, we have rather more 

 material at our disposal. The arrangement, as was natural, seems to have 

 been primarily a matter of vicinity, and this would include of course new 

 vills that sprang up on the waste land surrounding the elder ones. Then, as 

 will presently appear, certain vills were chargeable in pairs or larger groups 

 for services and renders, an arrangement which is in some cases older than the 

 Norman Conquest. Such a condition is quite what we should expect to find 

 when we remember that in the bishopric there was no uniform pressure 

 of taxation, no such fiscal system as was imposed on the rest of the 

 kingdom by the Domesday survey, which, whatever may be the details, 

 must still be regarded as a dynamic process in the formation of the English 

 manor. 



This matter may best be illustrated by a comparison of the disposition 

 of the vills in the fourteenth-century manors with their arrangement in 

 Boldon Book. 



Houghton Group in Halmote Rolls : Bishopswearmouth, Ryhope, 

 Burdon, Herrington, Newbottle, Morton, Wardon, Houghton. 



Vills in the Boldon Book : Wearmouth and Tunstall ; Ryhope and 



1 Maitland, Stltct Pleat in Manorial Ceurtt (Seldcn Soc.), Introd. ; Vinogradoff, VIMnage In England, 

 362-376. 



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