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Manors achieved what self-sufficiency they possessed by typically combining lords' agricultural land with the peasant labour needed to work it. Manorial self-sufficiency was far from complete, however, reflecting the unit's narrow resource base (averaging 500 acres or so of arable representing the lord's cropland and the holdings of perhaps twenty-odd peasant households) and frequent lack of geographical cohesion. Militarily, the manor might support a knight but the latter was bound to his lord rather than to the locality. Economically, the village (often a jumble of manors or of fragments of different manors) remained important in organising peasant land tenure and production. Manor and villagers both traded in agricultural produce and services (agricultural and other), allowing the growth of a (still small) urban population and of rural crafts. The manor was thus a highly "porous" institution, a cornerstone of the social order but only one element within a diversifying and increasingly complex economy.

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