Custom as Accumulation of Memory in the Medieval English Manor

The article is devoted to the problem of historical memory in the medieval manorial world. This is a complex and poorly researched issue. Clearly that there existed a certain channel of accumulation and transfer of memory about historical past, about individual and socio-collective experience of manorial community’s members. This role was played by manorial custom, being a legal phenomenon acting in a feudal estate. Manorial custom was based on such criteria as antiquity of legal rules, reasonableness (its correlation with everyday life and manorial economic development), permanence and continuity of reliance on the custom (its frequent usage). Daily life constantly corrected manorial custom; it formed a number of new rules which, in their turn, became customary for peasantry and in this way reflected in manorial surveys and court rolls. This is how the algorithm of existence of local law arose. In this meaning, manorial sources show us an example of reflecting not only this law itself, but also a deeper concept: of historical memory of the whole generations of English peasantry, understood not only as a memory about the past, but also about the process of continuity of being, which is fixed in the manorial written tradition. The article shows the main features of manorial sources (surveys and court rolls) — as documents, which contained “memorable” through its accumulation in the manorial custom.