Demesne From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Conjectural map of a feudal manor.

The brown areas are part of the demesne, the shaded areas part of the "glebe". The manor house, residence of the lord and loc ation of the manorial court, can be seen in the mid-southern part of the manor In the feudal system the demesne (pron.: /d?'me?n/ di-MAYN; from Old French deme ine ultimately from Latin dominus, "lord, master of a household")[1] was all the land, not necessarily all contiguous to the manor house, which was retained by a lord of the manor for his own use and support, under his own management, as di stinguished from land sub-enfeoffed by him to others as sub-tenants. The system of manorial land tenure, broadly termed feudalism, was conceived in Western Euro pe, initially in France but exported to areas affected by Norman expansion durin g the Middle Ages, for example the Kingdoms of Sicily, Scotland, Jerusalem, and England. Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 Royal demesne Lord's waste Later development Derivative usage Footnotes See also

Royal demesne In English common law the term ancient demesne referred to those lands that were held by the Crown at the time of the Domesday Book. Immediately following the N orman Conquest all land in England was claimed by the king as his absolute title by allodial right, being the commencement of the royal demesne. The king made i mmediate grants of very large parcels of land under feudal tenure from this deme sne, generally in the form of feudal baronies. The land not so enfeoffed thus re mained within the royal demesne, for example royal manors administered by royal stewards and royal hunting forests. It was from the income produced by these man ors retained in the royal demesne that the king financed his administration, unt il the advent of taxation. Manors in the royal demesne were let out at "farm" to the sheriff of each shire in which they were located. Thus in return for an ann ual fixed payment made into the Exchequer, the sheriff was free to extract and r etain whatever additional revenue he was able from the land "farmed", which amou nt was by design considerably greater than the "farm". The royal demesne could b e increased, for example, as a result of forfeiture where a feudal tenure would determine and revert to its natural state in the royal demesne. During the reign of George III, Parliament appropriated most of the royal demesne, in exchange f or a fixed annual sum, called the Civil List. The position of the royal estate o f Windsor, still owned by the monarch and never alienated since 1066, may be a r are remnant of the royal demesne. Lord's waste A portion of the demesne lands, called the lord's waste, served as public roads and common pasture land for the lord and his tenants.[2] Later development Initially the demesne lands were worked on the lord's behalf by villeins or by s erfs, who had no right of tenure on it, in fulfillment of their feudal obligatio ns. As a money economy developed in the later Middle Ages, the serfs' corve came to be commuted to money payments. With the advent of the Early modern period, de mesne lands came to be cultivated by paid labourers. Eventually many of the deme sne lands were leased out either on a perpetual (i.e., hereditary) or a temporar y renewable basis so that many peasants functioned virtually as free proprietors

after having paid their fixed rents. In times of inflation or debasement of coi nage, the rent might come to represent a pittance, reducing the feudal aristocra t to poverty among a prosperous gentry. Demesne lands that were leased out for a term of years remained demesne lands, though no longer in the occupation of the lord of the manor (see, for example, Musgrave v Inclosure Commissioners (1874) LR 9 QB 162, a case in which the three judges of the Queen's Bench Divisional Co urt and everyone else concerned assumed without argument that farms which were l et by the lord of the manor were part of the lord s demesne land). Derivative usage Since the demesne surrounded the principal seat of the lord, it came to be loose ly used of any proprietary territory: "the works of Shakespeare are this scholar 's demesne." The term has also become synonymous with a park in many places, for example in M oira, County Down.