The development of manor houses

China

After the fall of Tubo, there were many manors in various places where sects were divided and politics and religion were united.

Japan

In ancient Japan, a manor was a territory occupied by nobles, large temples, and shrines that had economic benefits.

The emergence of the manor system, politically, weakened the centralized power of the emperor and the imperial court. Economically, it promoted the development of various regions in ancient Japan. During the Kamakura Shogunate era the Shogunate claimed ownership of the estates and sent stewards (called jitsu in Japanese) to each region to collect taxes. During the Warring States period of Japan, the daimyo strengthened their control over land ownership, and the manor system disappeared.

Background

The emperor and the imperial court, in 723 and 743, respectively, enacted the Sansei Ichijin Law and the Kenden Suisei Private Wealth Law to encourage the reclamation of arable land.

In 756, in order to reduce the pressure on the peasants' livelihood, the court halved the time of miscellaneous levies for the peasants and exempted them from transferring and mediocrity for that year. As a result, the peasants' living conditions were improved, and they were then given greater incentive to engage in farming.

However, the greatest beneficiaries of these new policies, which were intended to improve the lives of the peasants, were not the peasants, but the nobles, the great temples and shrines. These groups held political power as well as social wealth. In the business of opening up the land, they possessed the main tools of agricultural production, including pickaxes and sickles.

Policy gave these interest groups more opportunities to expand their local power, so that they took the opportunity to encircle the wasteland and mountainous wilderness and drove their own slaves, indebted peasants, and foreign peasants who had fled from the country to carry out large-scale reclamation.

These interests often built homes and warehouses in the newly cleared land, and private estates were formed as a result.

These manors continued to provide income for the manor owners. In order to further strengthen their power, the manor owners bought or occupied the neighboring state-owned land, as well as the land belonging to the peasants. The manor was the basic economic unit of medieval Europe. At that time, due to the destruction of cities and the decline of commerce, the European economy was reduced to a subsistence agriculture, and economic relations were dominated by the exchange of labor and barter.

The production of the manor included food, clothing, tools and other necessities of life, a rural **** the same body, but also a political unit of autonomy, within the arable land, public land, churches, lords of the residence and serfdom, and so on. The land of the manor was owned by the lord, and the serfs were responsible for its cultivation. There were mutual rights and obligations between the lord and the serfs - the serfs provided labor, cultivated the land, and paid taxes, while the lord had to give land, provide protection, and administer justice. The serf had to pay for the use of production facilities on the lord's estate, such as mills, ovens, and winepresses.

The serf status was between that of a free man and a slave. Personal freedom was not completely lost, but the status was attached to the land. He could not leave the estate without the consent of the lord, so he was not completely free. Although the serf's freedom was restricted and his life was difficult, there was a certain degree of security. As long as the serf fulfills his obligations, he can work the land for generations; in case of difficulties, the lord is obliged to provide appropriate assistance.

As the Middle Ages progressed, farming techniques gradually changed the lives of serfs. Increased food production allowed the sale of surplus produce, which increased the income of the serfs and allowed them to buy their freedom with money. By the end of the Middle Ages, there were only a few serfs left in Western Europe.

The most common form of fiefdom was the possession of land called a manor. In the Middle Ages, a manor would have nine families working in the fields to produce food to feed themselves and to provide food for a tenth family so they could perform other labor. (In the United States today, this ratio of supply to demand on other fields is about one hundred to one.)

The typical homestead had a large house or castle surrounded by fields, farmhouses, pastures, and woodlands, and for the most part the homestead was self-sufficient. Some surplus necessities could be traded with other manors to supplement the shortfall. As the Middle Ages evolved and town markets developed, manors began to specialize and were able to produce a few commodities more efficiently, with some specializing in cheese, pigs, wine, or vegetables to make ends meet.

The lord of the manor (the landowner) lived in the great house or castle of the manor with his family, workers and squires. The squire consisted of knights and professional soldiers to provide defense and to be ready to perform feudal military duties for the High Lord. The larger the manor, the greater the number of squires.

The main population of the manor is non-noble and non-professional farmers. Most of the farm workers are serfs and must spend most of each week working on the lord's land in exchange for his protection. Serf families would own a few rows of crops in each of the estate's fields to make ends meet. Although serfs were not slaves, they were just as unfree. They could not marry, change jobs, or leave the estate without their master's approval. However, serfs did have some rights that were different from those of slaves. A serf's status was inherited from generation to generation, and as long as he performed his duties, no one else could take his land away from him. While the relationship between a vassal and a lord can be compared to that between a serf and a landowner, one clear distinction between the two in medieval times was that a vassal and a lord were an honorable contract, with the vassal being required to provide military service and the serf merely providing physical labor. Basic Information

In the Middle Ages, the manor house was not the ideal economy, with a very closed economic form, a level of living standards for people just to survive, and a slow progressing unit of production. These were related to the disorder of the time: after the Germans overthrew the Roman Empire, there was no sound system to replace it; and the barbaric tribes were constantly at war with each other, there was no complete and mature ruling system, so the king at that time, in order to maintain the power of the self, he adopted a rewarding law:

Firstly, the property that was seized was given to the individual strictly according to the system of equal division.

Second, the implementation of the law of land rewards, the artificial formation of a person's large estate, and the reward is not completed on a level, can be given on a level, in the Roman man-made property and the formation of the Germanic property; these gratuitous rewards, coupled with the Roman countryside property, the formation of the western European land is basically integrated into the large estates. Roman real estate for private, and this time the real estate artificially divided, and contains different components: one is the real estate owner's private land, and the other is to let people cultivate the land.

This institutional change formed the basis of the manor, which differed from the great estates in that the right to cultivate the land was not taken away.

Characteristics of the manor

The authority of the lord of the manor was best reflected in the "court of the manor", which was the ruling body of the manor and was characterized by the following:

Firstly, it was a non-permanent institution, and the interval between sessions was decided according to the number of local problems and the will of the lord of the manor himself.

Second, the provisions of the court, the local peasants have to attend, but not all have the right to speak, composed of representatives, the jury

Third, the manor court proceedings are rigid, all depends on whether to impress the lord of the manor rather than on the matter: the court's verdict, the results are not always able to be enforced.

The manor court is only involved in the internal affairs of the manor, is to deal with "family matters", but it did play a significant role in the management of the manor, including a variety of matters can be litigated within the manor, from small to large matters have. Through this system, it can solve its internal problems and play a role in adjusting.

Land Composition

The land composition of the manor is roughly divided into the following four parts:

First, the private land of the lord.

Secondly, the peasants' land.

Thirdly, grassland for grazing.

Fourth, woodland for estate timber.

Buildings

There were three types of buildings on an estate:

The first was the luxurious residence of the lord of the manor, located on a high hill, but not a castle as it was commonly known.

The second is the humble peasant cottage.

Thirdly, public **** facilities, including churches, water mills (owned by the lord of the manor) and craftsmen's warehouses.

The manor house, as a collective farming operation, was fundamentally one in which no one could individually own the manor house with all the amenities of daily life, including plowing the land and the animals and tools needed to do so.

There were many public **** facilities on the estate, including the private land of the estate owner, as servitude for the subordinate farmers and with priority.

The manor was a self-sufficient economic unit, manifested in the manor can accommodate a certain number of people, can be determined by the size of the manor size of the population. Of course this is also because of the low birth rate and survival rate in the Middle Ages, the number is always constant. And a natural balance could be maintained. The main necessities of the inhabitants were produced on the estates. In addition to working for the feudal lords, the serfs had to undertake all kinds of labor, donate agricultural products to the lords, and pay all kinds of miscellaneous taxes.

The manor also needed to be managed, but the lord of the manor did not care about the affairs of the manor, and often appointed his men to manage it. The owner's house was inhabited by the delegate, and the purpose of this was to know that the farmers were able to get the actual harvest and therefore had a tense relationship with the locals, while the specific work was done by the people in the village.

The size of the manor varies, some manors are a natural village, some include several villages.

Estates Species

The species grown on estates at the time had and have a lot to do with the division of the land itself.

Firstly, food included: wheat, which was the main food eaten by humans, but was slow growing, low yielding and very demanding on the land; barley, which was short growing and high yielding, but difficult for humans to consume, except in times of famine, and was mainly used to feed horses on weekdays.

Secondly, the cash crops were grapes, which may be regarded as a remnant of the Roman tradition, and were usually used for making wine, and olives, which were used for the manufacture of oil.

Thirdly, crops for animal husbandry. At that time, cattle and horses were necessities; the number of cattle had to be guaranteed, and horses were indispensable as a necessity for military service. Meat was provided by poultry, mainly pigs, sheep, chickens, etc., and a certain number of them had to be guaranteed when the weather was favorable; however, because of the backwardness of the breeding conditions at that time, these poultry were unable to survive the winter, and so it became a festival to slaughter a large number of them in the autumn, because it could avoid their deaths and preserve them for a long period of time, and the main preservation method was to pickle the meat.

At that time, the peasantry was poor and burdened, and its class included almost every kind of laborer. This class worked long hours and lived a life of "farming and weaving". The peasants not only farmed the land, but were also legally obliged to perform labor: building bridges and roads, which they could not be exempted from even if they paid for it. The living conditions of the peasants were also poor, with no beds at home and no recreational activities, life was monotonous and unchanging. There was no secular education in the pre-medieval period, and the peasants did not know how to read, nor did they have any books to read; only the clergy had parchment scrolls in their hands during that period.

The burdens of the medieval peasantry were also extremely heavy: rent in kind, rent for servitude, the cost of using the public **** facilities, the marriage tax that had to be paid at the time of marriage (especially outside the manor, which was subject to a penalty), inheritance tax, and the cost of living for the lord of the manor.

Through the above, it is not difficult to know, in fact, the medieval manor economic life is very fragile, the narrow scope of life of the farmers, the wind will be a problem, the period of the plague, the plague is more common things. But most people were also accustomed to this way of life and status. This manorial life was maintained for a long time in the Middle Ages and was not broken until the late Middle Ages.

Development

At the same time, the nature of the land also changed, the manor became not only a unit of economic behavior, but also a set of political, legal, and criminal (including the economy) in the integration of the administrative unit, and interfered with each other, which also formed the basis of the later medieval division: the lord of the manor is the same as the king of the manor, the sovereignty of the land, and all the feudal, and the feudalist only to the higher level of division, but also to the higher level of the land, and the land, and the land. The feudalists were only responsible to the higher level of feudalists, leading to the decentralization of the sovereignty of the medieval king.