Hanlith & Kirkby Malham Manor Courts -1607

Manor Courts were originally created in the medieval period but continued in places right up to the 20th century. By the 16th century a manor was essentially an area under the jurisdiction of a private court, a form of local government. The Manor Court rolls are the records of these courts and they contain a wealth of information concerning local issues, the most significant of which was the administration of copyhold tenure (a form of customery tenure where the tennant paid an entry "fine" and then an annual rental to the court and "held a copy of the entry in the court rolls") which was abolished in 1922. The Court's other function was to create and enforce bye-laws and in an area like Malhamdale these invariably concerned agrarian matters such as good stock management and regulation of the common fields, although they did concern other nuisance issues too.

This court roll is in the Lancashire Record Office, and was transcribed by Victoria Spence.

The most important manorial record is the court roll, usually a series of handwritten parchments documents, which up to 1733 (except for the period 1649-1660) were written in abbreviated Latin. The Manorial Documents Register lists the available court records for the manors of Hanlith and Kirkby-in-Malhamdale and indicates which Record Office holds them.

You can find out more about the records in the National Archives research guide Manor and Other Local Court Rolls, 13th Century-1922

Kirkbie Malham

Court Baron of Josias Lambert , Esquire,
held there the third day of November, 1607

[Lancashire Record Office, DDMA, Box 9a, Item 4]