Manor Court Rolls were minutes of Estate meetings, known as Courts Baron or Courts Leet - headed by the Lord of the Manor, with his Steward, to which his tenants came to take or renew land holdings, and to which presentiments would be made regarding any misconduct.
They were often recorded on lengthy strips of parchment, but in some cases, bound books were used.

The Manor Court records for Chardstock are mostly in book form, and are held at Dorset History Centre in Dorchester, where they are available to view on microfilm.

The collection comprises four books:

Book 1 1585 - 1647 with gaps, in Old English
Book 2 1672 - 1702 192 pages in Latin
Book 3 1718 - 1749 256 pages in English
Book 4 1750 - 1787 330 pages in English

In 2007, CHRG commissioned the Dorset History Centre to create high quality scanned images from Book 2, with a view to having a calendar extracted from these by a specialist translator of 17th Century manorial Latin - this will be posted once available.

We also hold a scanned image of a fragment dated 1608, which is in very poor condition; however, we hope that a transcript of this will also be available here soon.