MANSE

. Historians define a manse (Lat. mansus), particularly for the early Middle Ages, as a farmstead with house, associated buildings, fields, rights in common and forest, and so on, of sufficient size to support one peasant family, varying in acreage with the productivity of the soil. In the classical definition of the Carolingian manor or villa, this peasant holding is often contrasted to the lord’s reserve, the demesne (mansus indominicatus), on which peasants from the surrounding manses were expected to labor; in later documents, the old reserve, or demesne, itself appears to have been called a “manse” or “capmanse” perhaps after it had been cut up into peasant-sized holdings. Even for the early period, there are difficulties with such a definition because of the variability of family size and level of subsistence. For instance, if several days of labor services were owed to the lord by a member or several members of such peasant families, they may have been fed by the lord on those days; subsistence may have been possible on some manses only when agriculture was supplemented by the products of forest, river, and sea. Although the family generally appears to have encompassed only two or at most three generations and several servants, there are also occasional indications that brothers may have held manses in common for some periods. Frequently, even in the classic Carolingian villa, manses are found that may have been large enough to support three or four families; however, some of those families may also have had rights in other manses. In the later period, in addition to the manses in compact villages, there were additional isolated manses located in the interstices between villages; these owed no services to a lord on his reserve but were held as allods by free peasants.

Constance H. Berman