Definition
A reputed manor is a manor that has lost its essential legal character as a true manor but continues to be recognized and referred to as one by reputation and custom. In English land law, a manor in its full legal sense required two inseparable components: demesne lands (lands held directly by the lord) and services (the tenure obligations owed by free tenants). When these two elements became absolutely and permanently separated — so that the lord holds one without the other — the manor ceases to exist as a legally constituted entity. What remains is a reputed manor: a territorial and social designation that persists in name, custom, and public recognition, though it no longer carries the full bundle of manorial rights that defined the institution in its prime.
A reputed manor is also known as a seigniory in gross — that is, a lordship or set of rights floating free of the land structure that originally gave them coherence.
A second route to reputed-manor status arises when all the frank tenements (freehold tenancies) within a manor escheat to or otherwise become vested in the lord. With no tenants to owe services, there are no services to anchor the manor's legal reality, and the same degradation from true manor to reputed manor results.
Common Confusion
REPUTED MANOR vs. TRUE (OR LEGAL) MANOR: The distinction is functional, not merely nominal. A true manor carries enforceable manorial incidents — courts baron, rights of escheat, customary tenure obligations. A reputed manor retains the name and may retain certain appurtenant rights that have survived severance, but it cannot reconstitute the full manorial structure. Researchers should not assume that a source's use of the word "manor" confirms the existence of a legally operative manor; in post-medieval records especially, the label is often honorific or customary rather than technically precise.
REPUTED MANOR vs. SEIGNIORY IN GROSS: These are synonymous terms for the same condition, not distinct concepts. Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence both treat them as interchangeable. The term "seigniory in gross" emphasizes the detached, unanchored quality of whatever lordship survives; "reputed manor" emphasizes continuity of reputation. A researcher encountering either term in a historical source is looking at the same phenomenon.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a creature of English feudal and post-feudal land law and appears primarily in sources predating the Law of Property Act 1922, which effectively abolished copyhold tenure and stripped most surviving manorial incidents of practical force. Researchers working in:
— Conveyancing records and title abstracts from the 16th through 19th centuries will encounter "reputed manor" as a description that affects whether appurtenant rights (such as rights of common, fishery, or turbary claimed to belong to the manor) can legally be conveyed with the land. The answer frequently depends on whether those rights attached before or after the severance that reduced the manor to reputation only.
— Manorial court records: A reputed manor could still hold a court baron in many practical and customary senses, but the legal enforceability of that court's proceedings is compromised. Records from such courts carry less authoritative weight than those of a fully constituted manor.
— American colonial and early republic sources: The term occasionally surfaces in American contexts — particularly in proprietary colonies (Maryland, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas) and in early New York land grants — where manorial structures were attempted. Because genuine manorial tenure was always imperfectly transplanted to American soil, many American "manors" were reputed manors from inception or became so almost immediately. Researchers should treat any American use of the term with particular skepticism about what rights were actually exercised.
— The phrase in Black's that begins "Whenever the by the governor of one of the United States demesne lands..." reflects a textual corruption in that edition; the intelligible version of the passage, as preserved in Rapalje & Lawrence, makes clear the definition is purely English in origin and does not establish an American legal doctrine.
Trap for researchers: The persistence of the manorial name in estate papers, Ordnance Survey records, and Burke's genealogical publications has led many historians (and some courts in boundary and rights-of-way disputes) to treat a reputed manor as legally equivalent to a true manor. The distinction matters whenever the claim depends on a manorial incident rather than a separately documented right.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in close agreement, with Rapalje & Lawrence providing the more complete text. Both trace the definition to Brown (Browne's treatise on the law of property), and both identify the two triggering conditions: (1) absolute severance of demesne from services, and (2) vesting of all frank tenements in the lord by escheat or otherwise. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is the more reliable of the two; the Black's text as reproduced contains an obvious transcription error in its opening clause.
Neither historical source addresses the practical consequences of reputed-manor status for conveyancing or court proceedings with any depth, reflecting the dictionaries' reference rather than treatise function. For fuller doctrinal treatment, researchers should consult Blackstone's Commentaries (Book II), Coke upon Littleton, and the later editions of Scriven on Copyhold, all of which discuss manorial dissolution at greater length.
What both sources omit entirely is any discussion of the Law of Property Act 1922 and the Copyhold Act 1894, which rendered the distinction between true and reputed manors largely academic for most practical purposes in England after 1926. The historical dictionaries were compiled before or contemporaneously with that legislation and do not reflect its effect.
Jurisdictional Note
The concept is English in origin and has no independent doctrinal life in American federal law. In American jurisdictions that experimented with manorial grants — New York's Hudson Valley patroonships, Maryland's manorial grants, and certain Carolina proprietary grants — courts and commentators occasionally borrowed the terminology, but the transplant was always imperfect. No American jurisdiction developed a body of case law systematically applying the true-manor / reputed-manor distinction as English equity courts did.