Home
Manors and their Records
Using Manorial Records
§ Locating Manorial Records
§ Local and Family History
§ Further Reading
Cumbrian Superior Lordships
Glossary
Gallery
Links
Contents
History Department
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
Cumbrian Manorial Records
   

Further Reading

The works listed below include the standard works on manorial records and publications relating to manorial records in Cumbria. For a comprehensive listing of works relating to manor courts, see the bibliography compiled by Dr Christopher Harrison of Keele University (Manor Court Bibliography and Vocabulary).

Manorial records in general

  • Harvey, P D A, Manorial Records.  British Records Association, Archives and the User No. 5, revised edition, 1999 [the best introduction to medieval manorial records, with a chapter on early-modern manor court records]
  • Ault, Warren O, Open Field Farming in Medieval England: a study of village by-laws, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972.
  • Bailey, Mark, The English Manor c.1200-c1500, Manchester University Press, 2002 [excellent introductions to surveys, extents and rentals; manorial accounts; and manor court records with selected examples of these sources translated and annotated]
  • Harrison, Christopher, 'Manor courts and the governance of Tudor England', in Christopher Brooks and Michael Lobban (eds.), Communities and Courts in Britain 1150-1900, London: Hambledon, 1997, pp.43-59. 
  • Hearnshaw, F J C, Leet Jurisdiction in England, Southampton Record Society, 1908.
  • King, Walter J, 'Leet jurors and the search for law and order in seventeenth-century England: "galling persecution" or reasonable justice?', Histoire Sociale - Social History, no. 26 (1980), 305-23
  • King, Walter J, 'Untapped resources for social historians: court leet records', Journal of Social History, 15 (1982), 699-705.
  • Razi, Zvi and Smith, Richard M. (eds.), Medieval Society and the Manor Court, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
  • Stuart, Denis, Manorial Records: An introduction to their transcription and translation, Chichester: Phillimore, 1992.

Studies using Cumbrian manorial records

  • Dilley, Robert S, 'The Cumberland court leet and use of the common lands', Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, new series 67 (1967), 125-51.
  • Dilley, Robert S,  'Rogues, raskells and turkie faced jades: malediction in the Cumbrian manorial courts', Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, new series 97 (1997), 143-51.
  • Holdsworth, Philip, 'Manorial administration in Westmorland 1589-1693', Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, 3rd series, 5 (2005), 137-64.
  • Searle, C E, 'Customary tenants and the enclosure of the Cumbrian commons', Northern History, 29 (1993), 126-53
  • Searle, C E, 'Custom, class conflict and agrarian capitalism: the Cumbrian customary economy in the eighteenth century', Past & Present 110 (1986), 106-33.
  • Winchester, Angus J L, The Harvest of the Hills: rural life in northern England and the Scottish Borders, 1400-1700, Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Printed texts of Cumbrian manorial records

  • Bagot, Annette, 'Mr. Gilpin and manorial customs', Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, new series 62 (1962), 224-45.  [Includes discussion of a treatise re manorial customs in Kendal barony ]
  • Breay, John, Light in the Dales, Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1996. [Includes texts of manor court byelaws from Ravenstonedale]
  • Hodgson, W, 'A century of "paines" or local government in the time of the Stuarts, as illustrated by extracts from "A Paine Book for the Hamlet of Weathermelock"', Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, old series 7 (1883), 27-47.
  • Hudleston, Nigel, 'Elizabethan paines at Hutton John', Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, new series 69 (1969), 115-28.
  • Thompson, B L, 'The Windermere "Four and Twenty"', Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, new series 54 (1954), 151-64.
  • Whiteside, J, 'Paines made at Shap', Transactions of Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, new series 3 (1903), 150-62.
  • Winchester, Angus J L, The Harvest of the Hills: reural life in northern England and the Scottish Borders, 1400-1700, Edinburgh University Press, 2000 [Includes the texts of manor court byelaws from Windermere, Alston Moor and Wasdale Head]

< Using Manorial Records