What was a manor in the middle ages?

Answer 1

A manor was a piece of land where people could farm, grow food, and live. It was owned by a person who was called its lord, and who was a member of the nobility or gentry.

It had cottages for the farmers, and the farmers lived there. The cottages were usually organized into a hamlet or village. In some parts of Europe, there might have been longhouses instead of cottages, and a number of families would live together in the longhouse.

The land was divided into a part that was for the lord, a part that was communal, and small plots for each serf family. The peasants on the manor worked on all three.

The work the peasants did on the lord's land was considered part or all of their rent. They could also pay rent by providing a part of the crop, or by paying money.

The peasant farmers were usually serfs, and were not free to leave the manor, but they had their own plots of land and could choose what to grow there themselves and keep at least most of what they raised.

There was a manor house for a lord to live in, though there were always lords who had more than one manor, and so the lord might have been absent at least part of the time. The manor house could be fortified, and if it was looked rather like a castle. I read of manors possibly having castles on the, but I am not sure whether that is strictly true or whether some term is being used loosely.

There were barns and stables, workshops and other buildings. A manor often had a mill.

There was nearly always one or more sources of water.

Often there was a church. The presence of the church was the thing that distinguished a village from a hamlet. Sometimes there were multiple hamlets or both a hamlet and a village.

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Answer 2

The population of a manor ranged about from 50 to 200 people.

Answer 3

That's a fairly wide range of time,

but it ranged fron a half billion to one billion.