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The owner of a manor and its manor house would be a knight, but it was often left under the safekeeping of a steward or bailiff who acted as agent for the knight. Bailiffs had day-to-day control, like an estate manager.

The reason is simple - knights usually held many manors, spread across the whole country and they could not live in all of them at the same time. Take just one example:

When the Anglo-Norman knight Richard fitz Urse died in 1168, his son Reginald inherited manors at Barham, Kent and at Williton Somerset, plus land in Northamptonshire. Reginald would have visited each manor in turn to ensure that work was being done and rents, fines and fees were gathered and taxes were paid - but he could only live in one manor at a time, leaving the others under the control of a steward or bailiff.

In the time of Edward II (around 1307) one manuscript described such a man: "il fut soun bailiff del maner [...] et aveit la cure et l'administracioun des biens de mesme le maner" [he was his manorial bailiff and he had the care and administration of everything to do with the manor].

The Norman, Angevin and Plantagenet kings ensured that each knight held many manors that were distant from each other so that no knight could build up a powerbase in any one small area, potentially challenging the king's authority.

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14y ago

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