Probably few users of this volume, other than some professional historians, will have a clear understanding of the workings of the manorial system, as manifested in the medieval documents; we cannot claim that ourselves. But it is incumbent upon the editors of a volume such as this to attempt to explain what is actually meant by the entries printed below. The discussion which follows is not intended for professionals with a thorough knowledge of the medieval land-holding system in Cornwall. Because of the paucity of clear statements about some aspects of that system, there may be some errors or misrepresentations in what follows: anyone who detects them is encouraged to publish a better account.

First, the manor. Primarily this was an economic and administrative entity: ‘a single administrative unit of a landed estate, whether or not it contained a residence of the holder’. One of the largest manors in Cornwall, from before 1086 down to the eighteenth century, was Connerton, in Penwith; it is uncertain whether it has ever possessed a residence for its owner, though there are hints in the thirteenth century. One of the salient features of a manor was its entitlement to hold manorial courts; but Harvey has emphasized that this was a consequent feature of the manor, rather than originally a defining one. A manor was not necessarily a discrete area of land: it often embraced outlying areas, and the land of two or more manors could thus be intertwined (see below). Moreover, a particular farm or hamlet might owe allegiance to more than one manor, either through being subdivided into separate holdings, or at different levels of the land-holding pyramid: examples of both appear in the following pages. But at a time when hardly anyone could be said to own land, and most were occupying rented land higher or lower on the scale of sub-tenants, the manorial system was the method of organizing land-tenure.

The most important feature of a manor from the present point of view was thus that it possessed tenements, units of land which were held of it (i.e. owed allegiance to it).