In the section on manorial life and agriculture, the focus is on the responsibilities of reeves and estate managers, as evidenced in handbooks and in letters, but also on the rights and responsibilites of both men and women working as tenants on the land. The Records of Elton provide accounts for a manor, with all the agricultural tools itemised. The final excerpt, from a Jersey document, records the rights and duties of the king with regard to his tenants.

The conclusion lays out the four key arguments of the book. Firstly, manorial structures remained important to community governance across the late medieval and early modern eras. Secondly, the impetus for this continued vitality came from communities of tenants who recognised the value of manorial structures for their own needs. Thirdly, manorial governance could create a degree of inequality within communities, but this was constrained and varied between villages. Fourthly, state formation did not radically disrupt these manorial structures. These arguments lead to several historiographical interventions. They challenge the notion of a late medieval decline, support positive interpretations of lord-tenant relations, demonstrate that long-term dynamics could create a ‘middling sort’ and suggest some reasons for England’s early development of high state capacity. Finally, the chapter makes some comparisons with other European regions, demonstrating that while the emergence of local elites managing aspects of their community’s economy and society was universal, the exact relationship between lord, state and community created different governance structures.

The introduction starts by showing how the Swallowfield Articles, the famous record of the early modern ‘politics of the parish’, reveal the persistent importance of the ‘medieval’ manorial court leet to local governance. It then provides an overview of both the medieval and early modern historiography, showing how a newer set of contributions has emphasised continuity between these eras by revealing the importance of manor courts after 1500, a long-run connection between state and locality stretching back into the Middle Ages, and the existence of a medieval local elite. It shows that a flaw in the literature remains the lack of cross-period studies which this book tackles by exploring the functions of manorial offices, who filled these offices, and the ways in which officeholding systems changed in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation using a long-run time frame stretching from 1300 to 1650. Next, the key features of the case-study manors (Horstead, Cratfield, Little Downham, Worfield and Fordington) are discussed. The final section provides a plan of the book.

This chapter tells the story of the witch hunts arrival in Little Oakley and Beaumont cum Moze, and reconstructs the life of the sole suspect there, Annis Herd. Using parish and manorial court records, and the records of the archdeaconry court, it shows how Annis interacted with the churchwardens of several parishes, her inter-related neighbours and the Beaumont Rector, Richard Harrison, leading to her accusation.

This chapter examines how the witch hunt that began in St Osyth spread east to the three Soken villages, Thorpe, Kirby and Walton. It draws on manorial court records of these linked villages to reveal new information about the suspects and their accusers and it discusses their economic rivalries over resources and land.