Medieval manor houses were courtrooms and larders as much as homes
A medieval lord often could not live off one estate for a whole year. So he travelled, eating his way through the stores at one manor before moving to the next, leaving the house behind to be cleaned out. The building he left was less a private home than the local seat of government.
At the heart of every manor house stood its great hall. Here the manorial court sat, appointing officials such as the bailiff, granting leases, and settling quarrels between tenants; here too the lord shared communal meals and threw banquets. A private chamber called a solar might be tacked on for the lord himself. Because many lords held several manors, often spread widely, they relied on a steward to preside in their absence, and on a resident bailiff or reeve to run each place day to day.
Many of these houses were fortified, though never like castles. Building walls with battlements required a royal licence to crenellate, and a moat, drawbridge and gatehouse could keep out wandering robbers in an age without police, but there was no keep to withstand a siege. After the Wars of the Roses calmed England, fortification became increasingly a badge of status, proof that the owner was trusted enough to receive the licence. Nearly every large manor also had a deer park beside it, enclosed by royal permission, which worked essentially as a stocked larder of venison that even visiting royalty could not hunt.
The Tudor century softened everything. Sutton Place in Surrey, built around 1521, was among the first great unfortified houses. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, favourites bought former religious houses and turned them into mansions, which is why names like Woburn Abbey survive. Under Elizabeth I and James I, houses such as Longleat and Hatfield were designed by architects rather than masons, and the estate gradually replaced the manor.
Names carry history too. Court marked a building where the lord held court over tenants, and Place probably echoes the Italian palazzo. Calling a house a Manor is largely a nineteenth-century romantic habit, as at Waddesdon. Across the Channel, the word manoir was historically used only in Normandy and Brittany.
Source: Manor house
