No. We do not accept payment for our research services. We are a volunteer organization. Our website is paid for by an association of solicitors. No one in our organization is allowed to receive any remuneration.
Generally speaking, our threshold is whether or not a claim could stand up as valid if tested in court. We approach every assessment with the idea that the claim we are testing will be contested in a legal proceeding. If we would feel with a high level of confidence that the claim would be upheld, then we grant it the status of “Verified.”
The truth is, not many. Only 11% of the claims we receive are deemed valid during an assessment. Most of the claims that we determine are valid come to us from title brokers, solicitors, and private parties.
The general rule is probably not. But there are always exceptions. Some manorial title brokers sell verifiable titles that have passed our in-depth scrutiny. It is not our place to give legal advice, so we suggest you ask the broker to provide an NFRA Reg. No. for the title in question. That way, you can independently verify that it has been tested and is considered valid in our NFRA Registry.
We do not provide certificates. We will provide an NFRA Registry number for a claimed title to validate it. You can print the Notice of Entry page that you are interested in. Generally speaking, unless a document comes from His Majesty’s Government, Crown Court, or Legal processes, it is simply a novelty declaration.
We will only disclose limited data, but due to the nature of our service, some items like the name, title, and location of the title in question will be searchable on our site.
Our response is yes. The same question can be asked about a title in the peerage system. In our opinion, it is a question of heritage and history. Valid manorial titles are historical artifacts that, in most cases, have existed for more than a millennium. They are a unique and personal connection to the past. The lordships and baronies of feudal England predate our modern peerage but are legally recognized because of their historical significance. The Nation’s history regarding titles is complex and filled with contradictory terms and rulings, but in summary, manorial titles have been and will always be a valuable and relevant part of our heritage and culture.
We believe that feudal manorial heritage is a valuable and essential part of the UK’s past. To be as objective as possible, none of our evaluation teams or historians possess a manorial title. We have two peers of the realm who work with us in an advisory capacity. We also have three Baronets (identified on the Official Roll of the Baronetage) that work with us in various ways. We desire to maintain our objectivity and do this to maintain the integrity of our cherished history.
We do not. We provide our detailed findings that are not generally available to the public to subject matter experts who will testify on a client’s behalf. We recommend you consult your solicitor to find a qualified subject matter expert.
Please contact head.archivist@feudal.org.uk to coordinate the delivery of your transfer documentation to ensure that the provenance of your title remains intact.
We are always looking for others who love history as much as us. We are looking for individuals with have or are enrolled in a postgraduate degree program related to history, research, or law. If you would like more details, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at volunteer@feudal.org.uk
We do not publish the member of our evaluation teams. We want to remove any possibility of external influence on our process.
We do not provide legal advice or publicly provide interpretations of case law. We do, of course, take past and current litigation outcomes into heavy consideration. We are aided by solicitors and legal scholars when considering how legal precedence established by our common law judicial system affects our assessment efforts.
