MANORIALISMowing suit of court, giving counsel to the lord when
requested, and to aid him with money grants on certain
occasions. Some kinds of service were largely formal-
ized by a symbolic gift, such as the hawk that the
manor of Dalkey, an important outport of medieval
Dublin, was expected to provide each year.
It is difficult to give a strict definition of what con-
stituted a manor, which was the basic economic and
juridical unit of this feudal system of land holding.
Most manors would have some evidence of the fol-
lowing: a legal recognition of the landowner’s rights
of lordship over the people within the manor, the exist-
ence of demesne land (farmland directly cultivated by
the landlord), land held by tenants, and, finally, some
evidence of a dependent tenantry there. One of the
major institutions of the manor was the manorial court
that mainly decided on disputes over land tenure,
although minor breaches of the law were also tried
there. It is a pity that so few manorial court rolls have
survived in Ireland, as they could give us a unique
insight into the every day life of the majority of the
population within the English lordship.
There appear to have been wide regional variations
in the amount of land in any particular manor occupied
by the demesne farm, especially in the marchlands of
Connacht. In the more prosperous parts of Leinster, it
varied from around 13 percent to over 25 percent of
the entire lands of the manor. The free tenants obvi-
ously held most land within the manor, paying a money
rent or even holding their land by military service. As
well as being liable for certain feudal obligations, they
had to attend the manorial court. A particularly Irish
type of free tenure was that of the gavillers, who on
top of paying rent were liable for some labor services.
In Ireland, many of the unfree tenants were often
known as betaghs, a corruption of the Irish word
biatach, meaning “food-provider,” a rank of semi-free
tenants in pre-Norman society, owing some kinds of
labor service but who owned their own land. They
seem generally to have been better off in material terms
than the other major class of servile tenants, known as
the cottars.
In the eastern half of the country, where there was
a denser Anglo-Norman settlement and where the new
settlers felt more secure, these manors appeared to
have been largely modeled on similar ones in England
and Wales. But in the more westerly edges of the
colony, where the “land of war,” or less securely held
areas predominated, it seems as though these manors
really only existed in the documents of the Anglo-
Norman lordship. One of the most significant differ-
ences on Irish manors was the existence of people who
held their land by burgage tenure. These burgesses
lived in what have been called “rural boroughs,” which
were little more than villages but which had this attrac-
tive form of tenure obviously designed to attract col-
onists from England, Wales, and possibly even
Flanders to settle and develop the under-populated
lands of Ireland. These tenants were a distinctive com-
munity within many Irish manors, each holding their
burgage plots at the low rent of one shilling per annum,
enjoying other privileges including having their own
court, quite separate from the manor court, but still
under the overall jurisdiction of the lord. Indeed, in
the settlement of Kilmaclenine, County Cork, the bur-
gesses there owed some labor services to their lord,
the bishop of Cloyne.
The other difference between Ireland and Britain in
this period was the fact that the lands of the church
were often held in “free alms,” or sometimes as fee
farms, which meant that they were removed from the
military obligations of the feudal system. More gen-
erally, grants to sub-tenants of fee farms, a form of
hereditary tenure not liable to military service but to
a fixed rent, were much more common in Ireland than
in Britain. The system of agriculture most often asso-
ciated with the manors in the eastern half of the coun-
try was the arable open fields. Here, all the plowed
arable land was distributed over two or three large
unenclosed fields (each one up to 500 acres in extent),
one of which lay fallow for a year in order for it to
recover its productivity. Each field was then subdivided
into scattered holdings or strips of land that were par-
celed up among the tenants of the manor, with every-
one sharing both good and poor land. It is, however,
unclear how far this system extended in the western-
most manors, where pastoral farming arguably pre-
dominated.
Understanding the population of one of these man-
ors is fraught with many difficulties, firstly because
the extents or surveys that do survive often do not have
a complete itemization of all the classes of people on
a particular manor. In the second place, those listed
are only the heads of households within the manor, so
some estimate of the average medieval household has
to be reached, probably in the region of four to five
people. When these caveats are taken into account, it
would appear that an average-sized manor probably
only had a population of a few hundred people. One
such manor was Knocktopher in County Kilkenny,
where a fairly detailed extent for 1312 lists four farm-
ers holding between 5 and 74 acres of arable land, then
at least forty-five free tenants holding from as much
as 2,520 acres of arable land all the way down to just
one house plot. There are also ninety-seven burgesses
who held 360 acres of arable land, and finally there is
mention of a settlement of betaghs, but the record does
not give any indication of their probable numbers,
although they farm 120 acres of arable land. These
figures reveal the great differences in wealth within