Newsletter 44 - Autumn 2005

Manorial Documents Register Online

Nigel Saul

The Manorial Documents Register (MDR), maintained by The National Archives on behalf of the Master of the Rolls, is a unique finding aid assembling information about all known surviving manorial records wherever they may be found. Manorial records are a valuable source of information for researchers with a wide range of historical interests.

The sections of the MDR for Surrey and Middlesex have recently been revised and put online as the result of a collaborative project led by the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, and involving the Surrey History Centre, London Metropolitan Archives, and The National Archives. The initiative has been generously funded by the Marc Fitch Fund. The section of the MDR for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight was similarly upgraded and put online some years ago. This means that the sections for no fewer than three contiguous southern counties can now be accessed by anyone from a networked computer terminal.

The MDR was established by Baldwin’s government in 1926. For long it has existed only in the form of paper index slips arranged alphabetically manor by manor in drawers in the HMC (now TNA). Only limited searches by manor name could be made. Now, at least for the group of three southern counties, the Register is readily available, and more extensive searches can be undertaken. It will be possible, for example, to make searches across whole counties for records of a particular type or date.

For all three counties, the surviving corpus of manorial records is widely scattered. Changes in landownership, the break-up of the monasteries, the concentration of property in the hands of particular families, and the families’ subsequent extinction, have all led to dispersal across a wide range of archives. Only the MDR brings together information about location in one finding aid.

The sections of the MDR for the counties of Hampshire, Surrey, and Middlesex (as well as Norfolk and Yorkshire) can be searched online via The National Archives website at: http://www.mdr.nationalarchives.gov.uk/mdr/