Manors were landed estates, their distinctive feature being the manorial court. By no means all documents created by these courts survive. Those that do can be a treasure trove for exploring the economic and political management of the locality and the lives of people, great and small alike, who were involved.
Manors and manorial records, published by The National Archives, is a major help to understanding the manorial system and the types of records it created.
The Manorial Documents Register identifies the nature and location of records of manors throughout England and Wales. It is searchable by county, parish, manor and other filters. These are some key pages:
- Introduction.
- 528 manors in Northamptonshire.
- 7,641 records that relate to manors in Northamptonshire.
Books and articles relating to the subject can be found in this list:
- A Park Too Dear: Creating a Modern Deer Park by T J Waterfield [2001] (page 62) Meticulous investigation of evidence for the changes that during 1828-1862 Beriah Botfield made to highways and footpaths in the vicinity of Norton by Daventry.
- A Rental of the Manor of Towcester, 1609
- Estate letters from the time of John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, 1709-39 edited by P H McKay and D N Hall [2013]
- Estate Records of the Hotot Family edited by Edmund King [1983] (page 1)
- George, Fourth Earl of Northampton: Estates and Stewards, 1686-1714 by H D Turner [1967] (page 97)
- Good News from the Kettering Manors An overview of the numerous archives that survive from the three manors of Kettering, with links to extracts from their Court Rolls which have been published online.
- Glossary Information The meanings of 130 words and phrases that may be encountered in manorial records, wills, inventories and other documents.
- Grafton Estate Origins and Brief History of the Grafton Estate The honor of Grafton included 30 manors in Northamptonshire and 7 in Buckinghamshire, all of which are named here.
- Grafton Regis Includes numerous transcripts of primary sources and a catalogue of 3200 documents from the Grafton Estate.
- Henry de Bray's Estate Book (c.1289-1340), edited by Dorothy S Willis [1916] Henry de Bray owned a small estate at Harlestone and compiled this book partly from documents he possessed and partly from memory. The text (unfortunately in untranslated Latin) is accompanied by an introduction in English, a detailed index and a series of pedigrees extracted from the text.
- Landed Estates in Northamptonshire: the Rural Rental Economy, 1800-1881 by Georgina Ann Dockrey [2014]
- Merger and Crisis: Sir John Turner Dryden and Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire, in the Late Eighteenth Century by Mark Rothery and Jon Stobart [2012] (page 19)
- Newton Bromswold Manorial Land by Geraldine Hunt [2002] (page 27)
- Peterborough Medieval Court Rolls translated by Margaret Briston [2015]
- The Accounts of Godfrey Crowland, Abbot of Peterborough 1299-1321 edited by Sandra Raban [2011]
- The Black Death in the Hundred of Higham Ferrers by Norman Groome [1982] (page 309) Records from the Court of that Hundred provide evidence about exactly when the pestilence struck locally early in 1349.
- The Manors of the Sacrist of Peterborough edited by T M Halladay [2020]
- The Letters of Henry Gladwell; Bailiff to the Drayton Estate, Northamptonshire 1785-1814 edited by Bruce A Bailey [2023]
- The Pilsgate Manor of the Sacrist of Peterborough Abbey edited by Margaret E Briston and Timothy M Halladay [2009]