Manorial Document Register

   

Revising the Bedfordshire Manorial Documents Register

Bedfordshire & Luton Archives Service is to enter an agreement with The National Archives and Royal Holloway College to revise and computerise the Manorial Documents Register for Bedfordshire. The Manorial Documents Register (MDR) is the official register of manorial documents for England and Wales maintained by The National Archives on behalf of the Master of the Rolls. It identifies the nature and location of manorial records, which have statutory protection under the Manorial Documents Rules. They are defined in the Rules as court rolls, surveys, maps, terriers, documents and books of every description relating to the boundaries, franchises, wastes, customs or courts of a manor.

  Cranfield Customs of the Manor 1484

Customs of a manor applied to the people who held copyhold land; that is, their title to the land was based on what was recorded on the court roll. The rules of the manor are written in English because it was important that tenants understood them. [ref.AD341]

The system of manors dates from at least the time of the Norman Conquest and continued into the 20th century. The records these manors created can provide a wealth of information for the family and social historian. As archives which record day-to-day transactions in local communities, they bring us close to people in the past telling us, amongst other things, some of the rules by which they lived. They show land they held and the way it was worked, family relationships, and which members of the local community served as manorial officials.

Although owners and holders of manorial documents are required to notify the MDR most of the information on the register dates from the 1920s when a series of property acts gradually eroded the way that manorial land was managed. The project to check, revise and computerise the MDR has been slowly working through the country county-by-county and now it is Bedfordshire's turn. We are particularly lucky that funding for our project has been allocated by The National Archives so that Bedfordshire & Luton Archives Service only has to provide a base for the project and advice and support in using our collections.

Our project is likely to start within the next few months and should be completed in March 2013. For the project we will need a project officer, who will be employed through Royal Holloway College, but who will be based at Bedfordshire & Luton Archives in Bedford. The project officer will undertake research to develop authenticated lists of parishes and manors within the county, check the documents listed on the current paper-based MDR, and seek out other documents not currently known to the MDR. This will involve visiting The National Archives and other archives as well as using the collections held by Bedfordshire & Luton Archives. All this information is then entered into Access and Excel before being loaded onto the MDR available via The National Archives website. If this is something that interests you please contact Pamela Birch|  for more details; she will also be able to inform you when the advertisement for the post is to be published. The project will use volunteers to enter the current MDR data into an Excel spreadsheet and possibly for other data input and record checking. If you are interested in becoming a volunteer on this part of the project please contact Pamela.