Subinfeudation 102: The Manor

Growing up as a GM the players saved villages again and again and those villages were inevitably reskinned version of the village of Homlet (T1)  or Orleans (N1). I saw some villages in the Harn products but somehow my mind got stuck on village = manor. I didn't really have a solid grip on what an actual medieval manor looked like and when I finally found a map of one I was more than a little surprised.

So here is the manor of Harmondsworth, a real medieval manor.

Note the Bath-to-London road cuts across the center of the fief from East-to-West. This is an old Roman road so its probably pretty nice. The fields that pay the bills dominate the center with Heath and Moor on the outskirts. The scale of the map is three miles wide and two miles high (as you can see by the red/black bars) but the guts of the feif are mostly within a one to one and a half mile area. Surprisingly the manor is not just one settlement but five.

• Harmondsworth, the village proper is on at the Northwest of the fields. It has the same name as the manor which is probably not an accident.  It has a Parish church (the church of St Mary) that probably served as the social center of the fief and that still exists despite being rebuilt over the centuries. Harmondsworth is also the location of the Great Barn the largest barn in England (and it is still there despite the proximity to the airport). In 1391 the Harmondsworth village contained 1330 inhabitants so Harmondworth village would be where the bulk of the manor's inhabitants actually live.
• Longford - A hamlet at the fords of the River Colne and its distributaries. Judging by the name their presumably was no bridge and the rivers had to be forded. Folks that arrived near dusk would probably stay in the hamlet rather than attempt to cross in the dark which justified the place. In 1337 Longford had 30 inhabited buildings.
• Perry Oaks - The manor house at the Southern edge of the fields. Pretty isolated from the peasants. Initially the fief was held by the Church (and likely administered out of St Mary's but eventually sold to Bishop William of Wykeham who built the manor in Perry Oaks for some reason.
• Heathrow - During the medieval period Heathrow or Heath Row was a one-sided lane of smallholdings at the edge of the Heath. Now its an airport, go figure.
• Sipson - Initially this was just a major farmstead but eventually additional buildings raised the place to the level of hamlet. In later maps Sipson had their own dedicated fields so this hamlet may be a case of peasants just building closer to the workplace to cut down on the commute.

Beware the Moors

Perhaps someone has an answer for why old maps have two different names for what is essentially the same thing we have:

• Heath - an area of uncultivated land usually characterized by heather, gorse, and coarse grasses.
• Moors - A tract of open uncultivated upland; a heath.

I think it's probably two old local names or one of the terms changed over time.

The maps I've found are all from the sixteen and seventeenth centuries and they show the "fields" subdivided so that Sipson has their own fields, as does Heathrow, so there is no way to tell if the folks in these neighboring hamlets considered themselves to belong to Harmondsworth or to belong to Longford/Heathrow or Sipson.

History of Harmondsworth Manor

• William the conquerer grants Harmondsworth to an abbey in Rouen
• William of Wykeham (1320 or 1324-1404), Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of England, bought Harmondsworth in 1391