was a lot of a manorial court’s work just adjudicating conflicts over whether one neighbor stole another’s goat, or shifted a boundary stone a few inches over

That was part of it, but a lot of the manorial court’s work was in organizing agricultural labor (what fields were to be fallow and what sown in which crops, and so on) and the payment of rents, taxes, and labor, which feeds back into the organizing labor b/c usually the way that the lord’s lands are to be farmed would set the pattern for the peasants. 

See, the thing about medieval agriculture is that even though the land was carved up into little individual strips to which each family had leases and rights, it was farmed collectively.