A lord of the manor, in Anglo-Saxon England and Norman England, is the landholder of a rural estate. The titles date to the English feudal (specifically baronial) system. The lord enjoyed manorial rights (the rights to establish and occupy a residence, known as the manor house and demesne) as well as seignory, the right to grant or draw benefit from the estate (for example, as a landlord). The title is not a peerage or title of upper nobility (although the holder could also be a peer) but was a relationship to land and how it could be used and those living on the land (tenants) may be deployed, and the broad estate and its inhabitants administered. The title continues in modern England and Wales as a legally recognised form of property that can be held independently of its historical rights. It may belong entirely to one person or be a moiety shared with other people. The title is known as Breyr in Welsh.

In the British Crown Dependencies of Jersey and Guernsey the equivalent title is Seigneur.

A similar concept of such a lordship is known in French as Sieur or Seigneur du Manoir, Gutsherr in German, Kaleağası (Kaleagasi) in Turkish, Godsherre in Norwegian and Swedish, Ambachtsheer in Dutch, and Signore or Vassallo in Italian.

The manor formed the basic unit of land ownership within the baronial system. Initially in England the feudal "baronial" system considered all those who held land directly from the king by knight-service, from earls downwards, as "barons". Others forms of land tenure under the feudal system included serjeanty (a form of tenure in return for a specified duty other than standard knight-service) and socage (payment of a fee). Under King Henry II, the Dialogus de Scaccario already distinguished between greater barons (who held their baronies per baroniam by knight-service), and lesser barons (who owned the manor without knight-service). As they held their title due to ownership of manors, and not per baroniam knights service, lords of the manor were in the group of lesser barons. The entitlement or "title" to attend the King's Council in parliament began to be granted exclusively by decree in the form of a writ of summons from 1265 entrenching the status of the Greater Barons and effectively founding the House of Lords.

Magna Carta (which had been first issued in 1215) had declared that "No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers", and thus this body of greater Barons with a right to attend parliament were deemed to be "peers" of one another, and it became the norm to refer to these magnates collectively as the "peerage" during the reign of Edward II. Meanwhile the holders of smaller fiefdoms per baroniam ceased to be summoned to parliament, and instead lesser barons of each county would receive a single summons as a group through the sheriff, and representatives from their number would be elected to attend on behalf of the group (this would later evolve into the House of Commons). This meant the official political importance of ownership of manors declined, eventually resulting in baronial status becoming a "personal" title rather than one linked to ownership of territory. The lesser baronial titles, including lordships of the manor, therefore were not incorporated into the peerage. It is understood that all English Feudal Baronies that were not Lordships of the manor and had not been upgraded into a peerage, were abolished by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660 (12 Cha. 2. c. 24), passed after the Restoration, which took away knight-service and other legal rights. This left Lordships of the Manor as the sole vestige of the English feudal system. Like their English counterparts, by 1600 manorial titles in the formerly Norman territories in France and Italy did not ennoble their holders in the same way as did, for example, a barony in these territories.

Lordships of the manor often have certain feudal era rights associated with them. The exact rights that each manor holds will be different: the right to hold a market, a right over certain waterways or mineral deposits are all within scope.

Historically a lord of the manor could either be a tenant-in-chief if he held a capital manor directly from the Crown, or a mesne lord if he was the vassal of another lord. The origins of the lordship of manors arose in the Anglo-Saxon system of manorialism. Following the Norman Conquest, land at the manorial level was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 (the Normans' registry in Sicily was called, in Latin, the Catalogus Baronum, compiled a few years later). The title cannot nowadays be subdivided. This has been prohibited since 1290 by the statute of Quia Emptores that prevents tenants from alienating their lands to others by subinfeudation, instead requiring all tenants wishing to alienate their land to do so by substitution.

Lord Denning, in Corpus Christi College Oxford v Gloucestershire County Council [1983] QB 360, described the manor thus: