estate

William probably distributed estates to his followers on a piecemeal basis as lands came into his hands. He granted lands directly to fewer than 180 men, making them his tenants in chief. Their estates were often well distributed, consisting of manors scattered through a number of shires. In…

…entire Frankish age the great estate, inherited from antiquity, was one of the components of rural life. These estates were, according to contemporary documents known as polyptyques, an important source of income for the aristocracy. The estates appear to have long been placed under cultivation by servile labour, which was…

…from the ownership of landed estates. Estates were exploited by subsistence tenants on a standard medieval pattern. The slave plantations of 1st-century central Italy had long disappeared, and the word servus now usually just meant a tenant without public rights as a freeman; the remaining slaves on the land were…