Manor house

The lord of the manor may have held several properties within a county or, for example in the case of a feudal baron, spread across a kingdom, which he occupied only on occasional visits.

Arranged for defence against roaming bands of robbers and thieves,[1] in days long before police, they were often surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge,[1] and were equipped with gatehouses and watchtowers, but not, as for castles, with a keep, large towers or lofty curtain walls designed to withstand a siege.

The primary feature of the manor house was its great hall, to which subsidiary apartments were added as the lessening of feudal warfare permitted more peaceful domestic life.

By the beginning of the 16th century, manor houses as well as small castles began to acquire the character and amenities of the residences of country gentlemen, and many defensive elements were dispensed with, for example Sutton Place in Surrey, c. 1521.

A late 16th-century transformation produced many of the smaller Renaissance châteaux of France and the numerous country mansions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean styles in England.

Nearly every large medieval manor house had its own deer-park adjoining, imparked (i.e. enclosed) by royal licence, which served primarily as a store of food in the form of venison.

Within these licensed parks deer could not be hunted by royalty (with its huge travelling entourage which needed to be fed and entertained), nor by neighbouring land-owners nor by any other persons.

Before around 1600, larger houses were usually fortified, generally for true defensive purposes but increasingly, as the kingdom became internally more peaceable after the Wars of the Roses, as a form of status symbol, reflecting the position of their owners as having been worthy to receive royal licence to crenellate.

The Tudor period (16th century) of stability in England saw the building of the first of the unfortified great houses, for example Sutton Place in Surrey, circa 1521.

During the second half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and under her successor King James I (1603–1625) the first mansions designed by architects not by mere masons or builders, began to make their appearance.

The seigneur and his family's private chambres were often located off of the upper first-floor hall, and invariably had their own fireplace (with finely decorated chimney-piece) and frequently a latrine.

[citation needed] In addition to having both lower and upper halls, many French manor houses also had partly fortified gateways, watchtowers, and enclosing walls that were fitted with arrow or gun loops for added protection.

Some larger 16th-century manors, such as the Château de Kerjean in Finistère, Brittany, were even outfitted with ditches and fore-works that included gun platforms for cannons.

These defensive arrangements allowed maisons-fortes and rural manors to be safe from a coup de main perpetrated by an armed band, many of which roamed the countryside during the troubled times of the Hundred Years War and the French wars of religion; but these fortified manor houses could not have withstood a lengthy siege undertaken by a regular army equipped with (siege) engines or heavy artillery.

Gut(shaus) implies a smaller ensemble of buildings within a more agricultural setting, usually owned by lower-ranking landed gentry whereas Schloss describes more representative and larger places.

Other terms were used, including landhuis (or just huis), a ridderhofstad (Utrecht), a stins or state (Friesland), or a havezate (Drente, Overijssel and Gelderland).

[8] During the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century, merchants and regents looking for ways to spend their wealth bought country estates and built grand new homes, often just for summer use.

These country houses or stately homes (called buitenplaats or buitenhuis in Dutch) were located close to the city in picturesque areas with a clean water source.

[citation needed] Alcázar is a type of Moorish castle or fortified palace in Spain (and also Portugal) built during Muslim rule, although some founded by Christians.

Initially, "quinta" (fifth) designated the 1/5 part of the production that the lessee (called "quintero") paid to the lessor (owner of the land), but lately the term was applied to the whole property.

This is still the case in the Southern Basque Country but the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in France, under which such practices are illegal, greatly upset this tradition in the North.

A cortijo is a type of traditional rural habitat in the Southern half of Spain, including all of Andalusia and parts of Extremadura and Castile-La Mancha.

The owners of American agricultural estates did not have noble titles and there was no legally recognized political structure based on an aristocratic, land-owning class.

As a result, this limited the development of a feudal or manorial land-owning system to just a few regions such as Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia, the Carolina Low Country, the Mississippi Delta, and the Hudson River Valley in the early years of the republic.

[citation needed] Today, relics of early manorial life in the early United States are found in a few places such as the Eastern Shore of Maryland with examples such as Wye Hall and Hope House (Easton, Maryland), Virginia at Monticello and Westover Plantation, the Hudson River Valley of New York at Clermont State Historic Site or along the Mississippi such as Lansdowne (Natchez, Mississippi).

In the southern states, the demise of plantation slavery after the Civil War gave rise to a sharecropping agricultural economy that had similarities to European serfdom and lasted into the early 20th century.

[citation needed] Most manor-style homes built since the Civil War were merely country retreats for wealthy industrialists in the late 19th and early 20th century and had little agricultural, administrative or political function.

However, many still function as private residences, including many of the colonial-era manor houses found in Maryland and Virginia a few of which are still held within the original families.

[citation needed] Unlike in Europe, the United States did not create a native architectural style common to manor houses.

In 1925, it was relocated to Richmond, Virginia from main sections dating from the 1620 remodeling of a priory in Warwickshire, England and reconstructed on a hillside overlooking the James River in Windsor Farms.