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Home> Lord of the Manor

Lord of the Manor - Law and Order.

John Wright purchased the Kelvedon Hall estate in 1538. He was to start a dynasty which was to hold the estate for nearly four centuries.

The control of the community and its well being was an important task for the Lord of the Manor. The manorial records for this period reveal some interesting facts.

The area where the present-day village is located was once an area of common land. There was a bye-law introduced whereby only tenants could remove heath, gorse and furze from the Lord's waste (the common land).

Dried furze was used to make malt and to repair houses - a writer of the Elizabethan period wrote of this style of vernacular building as 'with whinnies or with furze thy hovel renew'.

Parishioners had an obligation to work on the parish roads - Robert Pane failed to do this and received a fine. If a tenant wanted timber, even from his own land, he required a licence to do it from the Lord, unless custom allowed it. If the timber was on the waste then he would pay for leave to fell it.

Other community fines were for John Petit of Brizes who failed to clean ditches and cut trees which were a nuisance to the Queen's highway; and another parishioner failed to repair his hedge which was next to the common well. John Harrison and his son kept beagles and hunted coneys (rabbits) on the Lord's waste, they received a fine for their troubles.

Rarely a crime occurred so serious that it could could only be dealt with the Quarter Sessions. In 1579 a London silk weaver and four others broke into the Rectory at night 'intending to murder and plunder' the rector and his wife.