English Manor Rolls Collection

• Introduction
• Index to the Collection
• A Handlist of Manor Rolls

Introduction

This collection consists of 170 parchment rolls of diverse type (court-rolls, account-rolls, and others) from various manors, ranging in date from 1305 to 1770. The largest concentration of these rolls comes from the manor of Moulton in Cheshire. Other manors represented in large number are Odiham Hundred, Hampshire; Herstmonceaux, Sussex; Chartley, Staffordshire; and Onhouse, Suffolk. The rolls are grouped roughly by manor, but this arrangement is not adhered to consistently. A limited number of materials in this collection are not rolls, but single-sheet charters. One item (no. 130) is a map of the manor of Shelly, Suffolk.

The collection is briefly described by Seymour de Ricci, Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, (p. 1041, no. 85, and p. 1042, no. 86). What de Ricci described as two separate collections is now combined into one single collection. The largest part of the manor rolls (de Ricci no. 85) was purchased by Professor William James Ashley from James Coleman, bookseller, of Tottenham in 1892 and 1893. The remainder (de Ricci no. 86) was acquired by gift of E.F. Gay in 1919. The provenance of this material is noted in de Ricci.

Before their acquisition by the Law School, the collections were designated MS. Lat 14 and MS. Lat 14.7. At some point--perhaps just after 1925 when they were transferred from the Harvard College Library to the Harvard Law School--the collections were combined. As a single collection, the manor rolls were formerly designated simply as MS. Lat 14 and contained in boxes numbered 85-86, labeled A-E. The arrangement of the materials into numbered and lettered boxes has been abandoned in favor of the original sequential numbering of the individual items. The previous system of cataloging, however, is retained for reference, and is signaled by the use of square brackets ([]) in this handlist. 

Index to the Collection

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