Manors in Gross
When Wilson disposed of the four manorial titles before departing for America in 1852, three of them, Diddington, Kinwalsey and Nuthurst, had already lost their essential character as working manors. Diddington was a ‘reputed manor’, a title without territory, its copyhold dissolved and its courts silent. Kinwalsey too had lost its last connection to any physical land. In Nuthurst three small rented parcels with buildings had been jointly owned with Henry Bowen. Presumably these were disposed of to meet Wilson’s creditors before the lordship itself was sold. In the language of Scriven’s Law of Copyholds and Manors, the authoritative text of the period, these were manors in gross, lordships that had ceased to have any demesne lands annexed to them, existing as incorporeal titles, inheritable and transferable, but stripped of the tenurial substance that had defined them.
Knowle was different. Its court baron rolls survived. Copyhold tenants still held land within the manor by custom, their admittances and surrenders recorded in the language of a working manorial court. The advowson, the right to present a clergyman to the living, remained attached to the lordship and exercisable by its holder. When John Wilkes Unett of the Woodlands, Harborne (1770-1856) acquired the Knowle titles, he was not merely purchasing an honorific. By 1850 he was patron of the perpetual curacy of St Anne’s Chapel in the diocese of Worcester, where the incumbent, the Reverend Samuel Crowther MA, had been licensed in 1839. The gift of an ancient chapel lay not with a landed squire but with a Birmingham solicitor.
John Wilkes Unett was a man of considerable local standing. Born in Lichfield, he had built a substantial legal practice in Birmingham and accumulated significant landholdings in Smethwick and Harborne. He served as Under-Sheriff in 1839 and as Honorary Secretary of the Birmingham Town and District Bank. His son Thomas, born in Birmingham in 1800, rose to command the 19th Foot and was made a Companion of the Bath. He was mortally wounded in the Crimean War, leading the final British assault on Sebastopol in September 1855. When John Wilkes Unett died in 1856, the titles passed to another son, George Unett of Broadward Hall (1809–1881), a Justice of the Peace. Unett was a rare surname but one with broad family branches and both George and his father had married into these branches.
George Unett sold the titles in 1863 to Edward Westwood. The deeds he conveyed referred only to Knowle, Nuthurst and Kinwalsey. Diddington had come to Wilson with the other three as a single inheritance under Ben Palmer’s will, and had been sold neither to Earl Aylesford nor with the freehold conversion of the remaining lands. Its omission from the 1863 deeds reflected the disorder of Wilson’s bankruptcy, not a separation of the title, and Diddington passed with the other three as it had descended with Knowle since the thirteenth century.
Crest: A lion’s head
Edward Westwood of the Laurels, Oldswinford-in-Stourbridge (1811-1885), was himself a Birmingham solicitor and Lord of the Manor of Rowington. A notice published in the Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser in October 1865 announced that a Court Leet and Court Baron of Edward Westwood, Lord of the Manor of Rowington, would be held at the Elephant and Castle Inn in Rowington on Friday the 27th of October at ten o’clock in the forenoon. All persons who owed suit and service, or had not been admitted to their copyholds, or done fealty for their freehold lands holden of the manor, were required to attend. The stewards were named. The machinery of the medieval manor, its court, its copyholders, its fealty obligations, was still turning in a Warwickshire inn in 1865, managed by a solicitor from Stourbridge, for whom presiding as lord over his own court held obvious appeal.
Crest: A cubit arm habited with leaves Vert holding in the hand proper a club Gules spiked Argent
No equivalent court notice for Knowle appears in the newspapers of this period. By Westwood’s time the Knowle court baron may have been meeting less regularly, its copyhold transactions thinning as enfranchisement proceeded under the Copyhold Acts of 1852 and 1894. Westwood died in 1885 and in 1887 his widow Elizabeth sold the titles he had bought from George Unett to Maria Clarke, née Brown (1849-1908), wife of Joseph Bennett Clarke (1845-1925), another Birmingham solicitor.
Maria Clarke acquired the manorial titles in her own right, a Victorian woman holding lordships of the manor independently of her husband. After her death in 1908 they passed to her son Charles Neville Clarke (1878-1933). Joseph Bennett Clarke’s own interest in manorial titles ran alongside his wife’s. He purchased Longdon Hall and its lordship in 1899, sold it not long afterwards, and in 1907 acquired Little Aston Hall and the Manor of Little Aston with its 1,500 surrounding acres. J. B. Clarke was an eminent Birmingham solicitor who understood precisely what a manorial title represented, its legal character, its documentary requirements, its surviving rights, and his family assembled a collection of lordships across the West Midlands in the years before Parliament would fundamentally alter their nature. He died in 1925, the year after his son sold the Knowle titles to Major Everitt and the year Parliament legislated for the preservation of manorial documents.
The Law of Property Act 1922 brought to an end the last meaningful function of manorial courts. On 1 January 1926, all remaining copyhold tenure was abolished. Every parcel of copyhold land was automatically enfranchised and became freehold, its holder acquiring absolute ownership free from the customary obligations that had bound it to the manor since the medieval period. The lord of the manor retained certain preserved rights, minerals, sporting rights, markets and fairs, but the tenurial relationship between lord and tenant, the admittances and surrenders, the suit of court and the fealty obligations, were extinguished. Parliament recognised that proof of title to former copyhold land would continue to depend on manorial records, and in 1924 inserted a new section into the Act placing all manorial documents under the charge and superintendence of the Master of the Rolls. A Manorial Documents Committee was established in 1925 to locate and record surviving documents across the country.
Major Sydney George Everitt of Knowle Hall acquired the titles in 1924. Since Wilson’s departure they had passed from one owner to the next, most of them solicitors or their families, who lived further afield but knew what a lordship was and what the remnants of manorial law meant. Now they returned to a family living in Knowle, the manor reunited with its principal hall. Within two years, what had been four manors in different states of attenuation became four manors in gross, their rights vestigial, their courts stripped of legal function. The Squire’s manors now rested on history, social recognition and the integrity of the documentary record rather than on their medieval courts and copyholders.
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