FOOTNOTES:
[416] The Shepe Book of Tittleshall Manor (Holkham MSS., Tittleshall Books, No. 19), shows flocks of 500 to 1000 sheep being managed by a single shepherd, 1543–1549.
[417] e.g. Holkham MSS., Fulmordeston, Bdle. 6: “To the Right Honourable Sir Edward Cooke, Knight, Attorney General unto the King’s Matie. Humblie sheweth unto your lordship yor poore and dayley orators ... yor worshippes tenants of the Manor of Fulmordeston cum Croxton in the Duchie of Lancaster, and the moste parte of the tenants of the same manor that whereas your said orators in the Hillary Terme last commenced suite in the Duchie Courte against Thomas Odbert and Roger Salisbury, gent., who have enclosed their grounds contrary to the custom of the manor, wherby your wor. loseth your shack due out of the grounds, common lane or way for passengers is stopped up, and your worshipps' poore orators lose their accustomed shack in those grounds, and the said Roger Salisbury taketh also the whole benefit of theire common from them, keepinge there his sheepe in grazinge, and debarring them of their libertie there which for comon right belongeth unto them.” For the rest of this document see Appendix I., and compare the following defence to a charge of breaking open an enclosure: “The owners of the said tenements, from time whereof there is no memory to the contrary, have had a common of pasture for themselves and their tenants in one close commonly called 'the new leasue,' in the lordship of Weston in the manner following; that is to say, when the field where the said 'leasue' doth lie, called Radnor field, lieth fallow, then through the whole year; and when the said field is sown with corn, then from the reaping and carrying away of the corn until the same be sown again ... and the said Thomas Dodd further said that he did break open the said close ... being fenced in such time as he ought to have common in the same, to the end that his cattle might take their pasture therein" (William Salt Collection, New Series, vol. ix., Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. 8, No. 9).
[418] For complaints of tenants against the exactions, of farmers as early as 1413, see Victoria County History, Essex, vol. ii. p. 318. For a stipulation in the farmer's covenant, see the following: “Item a covenant conteyned in this lease that the said Thomas shall permit and suffer the customary Tenants peaceably to have and enjoy their estates, rights, grants, interests, and premises, without any lette, interruption, or contradiction of the said Thomas" (Roxburghe Club, Pembroke Surveys, Knyghton); and Northumberland County History, vol. v. p. 208, Buston: “The tenants of this town at the beginning of summer have their oxen allway grazed in Shilbottel wood, or else they were not able to maintain their tenements. It is therefore requisite that his lordship or his heire should have respect unto the want of pasture, that in any lease made by his lordship or his heire to any person of the pasture, the said Shilbottel wood, there might be a proviso in the said lease that the said tenants should have their oxen ground there, as they have been accustomed.” Instances of the harrying of the peasants by the large farmers are to be found, ibid., vol. i. p. 350 (Tughall), and p. 274 (Newham).
[419] All Souls' Archives, vol. i. p. 203, No. 356.
[420] Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i., Survey of Mudford and Hinton. In this case the aggressor was not the farmer of the demesne, but a freeholder owning a third of the manor. To escape his depredations the tenants proposed “to enclose their common fieldes and to assign to Master Lyte and his tenants his third parte in every field by itself, and to extinguish his right of common in the rest.”
[421] Victoria County History, Suffolk, “Social and Economic History.”
[422] For an amusing example see Conway, The Alps from End to End, pp. 190–192.
[423] The Commonweal of this Realm of England, p. 57.
[424] Ten acres of “turf” to forty acres of arable was the estimate of his requirements made to me by an Oxfordshire small holder.
[425] Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.: “The tenants of Landress have common in a certayne ground called King’s Moore for all kinde of cattle, and every one of them may keep in the said moore as much of all kind of cattle in somer as their severall or ingrounde will beare in the wynter, whyche is a great relief to the poore tenants, for as they confesse they keep all their cattle there in the somer, and reserve their ingroundes untouched for the winter.”
[426] e.g. Southampton Court Leet Records (Hearnshaw), pp. 4–5, 1550: “Item we present that no burgers or comyners at one time comyn above the number of two beasts upon payne of every such defaulte 2s.; provided that iff any of them have two kyne or wenlings, he shall have no horse, and yf he have but one cow he may have one horse.”
[427] Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.—Rolleston (Stafford): “The said manor is ... well inhabited with divers honest men, whose trade of lyvinge is onlie by husbandry ... and have no large pastures or severall closes ... but have been alwaie accustomed to have their cattle and sometyme their ploughe beasts pastured in the Queen's Majestie’s Park of Rolleston, for xxd., the stage ... without which aide and help they were neither able to maintain hospitallitie nor tyllage; and nowe of late yeares the fermor of the herbage hath advanced the stage to 6s. 8d., and yet the Quene’s Majesties rent nothing increased.”
[428] Fitzherbert, Book of Husbandry.
[429] Northumberland County History, vol. v., Birling: “Allowed part of 25s. 4d. for focage of Orchard Medow and Mylneside Bank, because they are now enclosed within the lord’s new Park, and this allowance shall be made yearly until the tenants of Byrling have and peacefully enjoy another parcel of pasture to the same value 11s. 8d." (Bailiff’s Accounts, 1474). R.O. Misc. Books Land Rev., vol. ccxx., f. 236: “Divers parcels of land and pasture of the manor of Farfield, now common of 140 acres, now occupied by the tenants there as commons and given them in exchange in satisfaction of their old common imparked in the new Park, £6, 13s. 8d.”
[430] Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, vol. i. p. 606. For the questions concerning common rights see ibid., pp. 594–624, and Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 340–356; Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, Essay II. chap, ii., and The Growth of the Manor, Book II. chap. iv. I have followed Vinogradoff’s rather than Maitland’s view.
[431] For buying and selling of pasture see below, and for enclosure pp. 168–170. The following seems a clear case of more or less corporate action. Holkham MSS., Burnham, Bdle. 5, No. 94: “Copy of an indenture between [here follows a list of names] of the same town and county, yeomen, as well on the behalf of themselves as of the rest of the comoners and freeholders of the said town of the one part, and Robert Bacon of [illegible] in the County of Norfolk, and Thomas Coke of Grays Inn in the County of Middlesex of the other part, that whereas heretofore Sir Philip [illegible] being lord and owner of the marshes hereafter mentioned ... did by his indenture of bargain and sale bearing date ... 1588, grant bargain and sell unto [list of names as above] all those marsh grounds lying and being in Burnham, to have and to hold the said premises to the parties last before mentioned and their heires to the use of them and their heires for ever, to the intent and purpose notwithstanding that the said parties last before mentioned there, being inhabitants in certain ancient messuages in the said Towne, and all other inhabitants of the said Towne there and afterwards for the tyme being in any of the ancient messuages and cottages in the said towne, for so long time as they shall be there inhabitinge and noe longer, according to the quantity of their tenures within the said Towne might depasture and feede the land as by the said deeds referring thereunto being had may more fully appeare; [it recites that the land] may by wallinge and embankinge the same be improved to more than a [illegible] value, and made fitt for arrable, meadowe, and pasture grounde, whereby tillage may be increased and his Majestie’s subjects receive more employment thereby, and danger of drawing [drowning?] of their stock for their feedinge prevented [recites that Robert Bacon and Thomas Coke have undertaken to drain the land in return for receiving three parts of it and that the persons above mentioned] being the major parte of the parties interested in the said salte Marshes, and being enabled by the lawes and Statutes of this realm to contract and bargaine with any person or persons for the draining thereof" [now convey 3 parts of the marshes to the above-mentioned Robert Bacon and Thomas Coke], June 8, 1637. The motive of this agreement was to get the low-lying meadows on the sea-coast drained. Drainage schemes were much in the air about this time, and any one who has seen the country near Holkham and Burnham will know how badly protection from the sea was needed. Two points are worth noticing: (i.) the tenants have no objection to surrendering part of their common if they get a quid pro quo; (ii.) they act as a single body. They buy land and they sell land and they can leave it to their heirs. Certain persons in the township act on their behalf, much as directors might act for a body of shareholders. Is it possible to speak of such arrangements simply in terms of individual rights? Are we not driven to think of the township as almost a landholding corporation?
[432] Common appendant, common appurtenant, common in gross, and common par cause de vicinage. This classification is not found in Bracton, and appears to date from the late Middle Ages, see Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, Essay II., chap, ii., and the following case: Coke’s Reports, Part IV., p. 60. Hill, 4 Jac. I. in Communi Banco: “Robert Smith brought an action of Trespass against Stephen Gatewood, gent., quare clausum fregit ... cum quibusdam averiis.... Defendant pleaded a certain custom, 'quod inhabitantes infra eandem villam de Stixwood prædictam infra aliquod antiquum messuagium ibidem ratione commorantiæ et residentiæ suæ in eadem habuerunt et usi fuerunt et consueverunt habere com. Pastur ... pro omnibus et omnimodis bobus et equis et aliis grossis animalibus.' Unanimously resolved that the custom is against law. 1. That there are but four manners of common, common appendant, appurtenant, in gross, and by reason of vicinage, and this common ratione commorantiæ is none of them. 2. What estate shall he have, who is inhabitant, in the common, when it appears he hath no estate or interest in the house (but a mere habitation and dwelling) in respect of which he ought to have his common? For none can have interest in a common in respect of a house in which he hath no interest.”
[433] Coke, Complete Copyholder, Sect. 53: “When an Act of Parliament altereth the service, tenure, or interest of the land, or other thing in prejudice of the lord or of the Customs of the Manor, or in prejudice of the tenant, then the generall words of such an Act of Parliament extend not to the copyhold; but when an Act is generally made for the good of the commonwealth, and no prejudice may accrue by reason of the alteration of any interest, service, tenure, or Custom, of the Manor, there usually copyhold lands are within the generall purview of such Acts.”
[434] Fitzherbert, Book of Surveying: “And as for that manner of common, me seemeth the Lord may improve himself of their waste grounds, leaving their own tenants sufficient common, having no regard to the tenants of the other lordship. But as far as all errable lands, meadows, leises, and pastures, the lordes may improve themselves by course of the common law, for the statute speaketh nothing but of waste grounds.”
[435] e.g. Coventry Leet Book, vol. ii. p. 510.
[436] Genealoger and Archæologist, vol. i., Manor of West Coker (Somerset): “The demesnes remayneth in one entier ferm, and is dymysed to one Sir John Seymour, knight, who being confederate with the freeholders of the manor, maketh such inclosers for his owne lucre, and suffreth the freeholders to do the same, nevertheless surcharge the common with their cattle, that in process of tyme yt wilbe the destruccion of the custumarye tenants.”
[437] For a discussion of the legal position of the copyholders see below, pp. 287–310.
[438] Coventry Leet Book, vol. ii. pp. 445–446 and passim.
[439] If the common was so large that it had been unnecessary to “stint” it, why did the city object to the lord putting additional beasts on? I take the situation to be that the Prior—probably tempted by the profitableness of sheep-farming in the latter part of the fifteenth century—diminished the pasture which the city could use, by putting on many more beasts than ever before, which, in the absence of a recognised “stint,” he was able to do without violating any custom, as he would have done if there had been a customary limit, as on many manors.
[440] Topographer and Genealogist, vol. iii. These are the people whom Heaven protected in the way described on p. 148 note. Observe what this little community endured. (i.) Sir Francis Englefield, senior, seizes 1900 out of 2000 acres of their common. (ii.) Sir Francis Englefield, junior, seizes “the charter of our town ... and the deed of the said common." (iii.) He tries to seize the remaining 100 acres, and ruins them by lawsuits “for the space of seven or eight years at the least, and never suffers any one to come to triall in all that space ... that the said Free tenants were not able to wage law any longer, for one John Rous ... was thereby enforced to sell all his land (to the value of £500) with following the suits in law, and many were thereby impoverished." (iv.) He turns them out of their shops in the market-place, and introduces instead “a stranger that liveth not in the town." (v.) He appoints his own nominee as mayor, in defiance of the custom which requires him to appoint one of two men submitted to him by the jury. (vi.) He prevents his victims from signing this petition by threats of eviction. ("They are fearful that they shall be put forth of their bargaines, and then they shall not tell how to live, otherwise they would have set to their hands.")
[441] Holkham MSS., Map of West Lexham.
[442] R.O. Aug. Off. Misc. Bks., vol. cccxcix., f. 201 ff.
[443] The manors are South Newton, Winterbourne Basset, Knyghton, Donnington, and Estoverton and Phipheld (Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Pembroke Manors).
[444] This, of course, is not inconsistent with a general appreciation, i.e. a general rise in wages and fall in the rate of interest.
[445] Northumberland County History, vol. ix. p. 124. For a similar case of evictions by Delavale, showing how they were carried out, ibid., pp. 201–202: “There was in Seaton Delavale township 12 tenements, whereon there dwelt 12 able men sufficiently furnished with horse and furniture to serve his Majestie ... who paid 46s. 8d. rent yearlie a piece or thereabouts. All the said tenants and their successors saving 5 the said Robert Delavale eyther thrust out of their fermholds or weried them by taking excessive fines, increasing of their rents unto £3 a piece, and withdrawing part of their best land and meadow from their tenements ... by taking their good land from them and compelling them to winne moorishe and heathe ground, and after their hedging heth ground to their great charge, and paying a great fine, and bestowing great reparation on building their tenements, he quite thrust them off in one yeare, refusing either to repay the fine or to repay the charge bestowed in diking or building.... The said seven fermholds displaced had to every one of them 60 acres of arable land, viz. 20 in every field at the least, as the tenants affirme, which amounteth to 480 acres of land yearlie or thereabouts, converted for the most part from tillage to pasture, and united to the demaine of the lordship of Seaton Delavale.”
[446] In several cases the freeholders' lands are not stated in the survey, and are therefore not included in this table.
[447] A few acres described as “held without title" are omitted.
[448] I am not sure that there are not other lands in Domerham not included in the survey or in the demesne. If this is so, the proportion of the latter to the rest of the manorial land would of course be reduced.
[449] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 22, No. 18.
[450] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Pembroke Manors.
[451] Ibid., and Hoare, History of Wiltshire, Hundred of Ambresbury.
[452] Northumberland County History, vol. i. p. 350.
[453] Ibid., vol. ix., Cowpen.
[454] Ibid., vol. i. p. 275.
[455] Ibid., vol. ix. pp. 201–202.
[456] Moore, The Crying Sin of England, &c.
[457] Cal. S. P. D. Eliz., 1595–1597 (p. 347), quoted Gay, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xvii.
[458] “Certayne Causes gathered together wherein is shewed the decaye of England only by the great multitude of shepe" (E. E. T. S. date 1550–1553). “It is to understande ... that there is in England townes and villages to the number of fifty thousand and upward, and for every town and village ... there is one plough decayed since the fyrst year of the reign of King Henry VII.... The whiche 50,000 ploughs every plough was able to maintain 6 persons, and nowe they have nothing, but goeth about in England from dore to dore.”
[459] For a discussion of the value of these reports see Leadam, Domesday of Enclosures, and Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. vi.; Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xiv. and vol. xviii.; Gay, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xvii. (1902–1903). A useful summary of the evidence, with a map illustrating the probable geographical distribution of the movement, is given by Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, pp. 42–54 and Map I.
[460] It is a question how far there had ever been an open field system in some of these counties, e.g. Cornwall and Kent. There certainly were some open field villages of the ordinary pattern in Kent (see Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, p. 230). But Kent from an early date develops on its own lines, and does not go through the same stages of manorialism and commutation as other counties. Much of it seems to start at the point which they reach only in the sixteenth century. Cornwall again, though in the sixteenth century there were commons where the villagers pastured their cattle together (see accounts of Landress and Porpehan, Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.), was largely a county of scattered homesteads and very early enclosure (for the “nucleated village" and “scattered homesteads,” see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 15–16), pointing to a different system of settlement from that of the counties where the open field system obtained. For enclosures in Devon and Somerset see Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, Part II., App. B: “A consideration of the cause in question before the lords touchinge depopulation," and Carlyle’s Cromwell, Letter XXIV. “Lest we should engage our body of horse too far into that enclosed country.”
[461] For intimidation see the case of Wootton Basset, quoted above, pp. 251–253, and below, pp. 302–304. Also Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii.; and Hales' defence (appendix to Miss Lamond’s introduction to The Commonweal of this Realm of England).
[462] Professor Pollard has good remarks on this point (Political History of England, 1547–1603, p. 29).
[463] Wolsey was responsible for the Commission of 1517. For a letter of Cromwell to Henry VIII. on the subject of enclosure, and for the views of Cecil and Bacon, see below, pp. 273–274, 279, 343, 387.
[464] Mackay, History of the English Poor Law, 1834–1898, pp. 10–11, 16–17.
[465] Poor Law Commission Report of 1834, pp. 264–277, 281.
[466] 27 Hen. VIII., c. 25. Under this Act city and county authorities are to relieve impotent beggars “by way of voluntary and charitable alms.” They are also for the first time given power to apprentice vagrant children.
[467] 18 Eliz. c. 3 directed that a stock of wool, flax, hemp, iron, or other stuff should be provided in cities, corporate towns, and market towns. The important words which show the change of opinion are, “To the intente also that ... Roges ... may not have any just excuse in saying they cannot get any service or work.”
[468] 14 Eliz. c. 5.
[469] Robert Cushman, “Reasons and Considerations touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the parts of America" (printed by E. Arber, The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers).
[470] Harrison in Elizabethan England (Withington), chap. x.
[471] Hist. MSS. Com., Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp. 160–161: “Orders agreed to by the Justices of the Peace for Cornwall at General Sessions for Bodmin the 5th and Truro the 8th of April, 39 Eliz.”
[472] Harrison, loc. cit.
[473] Ibid.
[474] Camden Society, 1886. Cases in Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, Michaelmas, 7 Caroli, Case of Archer. (The allusion in the text is to a precedent cited in this case.)
[475] Hist. MSS. Com., Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., Nov. 1597. “Notes for the present Parliament.”
[476] D'Ewes' Journal, pp. 551–555; see also Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 73–75.
[477] Hist. MSS. Com., Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp. 541–543.
[478] Lansd. MSS. 83, f. 68, quoted Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, p. 156 n.
[479] e.g. Nottingham Records, vol. iv. pp. 170–171, Nov. 4, 1577: “Any burgess that hath not been prentice to pay £10 and no pardon. Records of Leicester, vol. iii. p. 351, Oct. 17, 1598: “He is inhibited from dwelling in your corporation unless he finds bonds for £200 that neither his wife nor children shall be burdensome to the town." Southampton Court Leet Records, vol. i., Part I.: “One William Dye, undertenant to John Netley, dothe lyve idelly and hathe no trade.... He hathe 4 or 5 children in places from whence he came whom he will bring shortly hither, yf he may be suffered here to remayne, whom we desyer may be examined and removed from hence according to the Statute.”
[480] Some instances are given by Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 107–109.
[481] Nottingham Records, vol. iv. pp. 304–307.
[482] 31 Eliz. c. 7.
[483] 35 Eliz. c. 6.
[484] 39 Eliz. c. 3.
[485] For petitions on this subject see Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 784, pp. 81–82 (Wiltshire). The Warwickshire Quarter Sessions were much occupied with this, e.g. the following: “Trinity Sessions 1625. Fforasmuch as this Court was this present day informed ... by Sir Edward Marrowe, kt., and Thomas Ashley as the lords of the manor of Woolvey in this county ... that the said lords are content that William Wilcox of Woolvey in this countie shall build and erect a cottage for hys habitation hys wyfe and his small children uppon the waste within the said lordshippe, it is therefore ordered that the same being with consent of the lord as aforesaid that the same cottage shall be and continue,” and later “which cottage the Court doth licence" (Warwick Quarter Sessions MSS. Records).
[486] “Considerations Concerning Common Fields and Enclosures,” Pseudonismus, 1654.
[487] Moore, The Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the Poor: “And now alas, saith the poor cottier, there is no work for me, I must go where I may get my living. And hence it comes to pass that the open fielden towns have above double the number of cottiers they had wont to have, so that they cannot live one by another, and so put the fielden towns to vast expense, in caring for these poor that these enclosures have made.”
[488] e.g. Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 784, p. 95 (Wiltshire), pp. 292 and 298 (Worcester).
[489] See [Appendix I., No. VI.] Miss Leonard (Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix.) prints this document as referring to Norfolk, which appears to be an error.
[490] D'Ewes' Journal. Speech of Cecil, 1597.
[CHAPTER III]THE QUESTION OF TENANT RIGHT
(a) The Tenants at Will and the Leaseholders[ToC]
We have said above that we cannot measure the extent of the depopulation caused by enclosure, even for those years with regard to which figures are supplied us by Royal Commissions. But, after all, it is happily less important to arrive at an exact statistical estimate of the acres enclosed and of the number of tenants displaced, than it is to get a general view of the economic forces at work and of the structure of legal relationships upon which they operated. Given the economic reasons for the consolidation of holdings which were dominant in the sixteenth century, they could hardly have failed to result in evictions on a considerable scale, unless the tenants themselves had sufficient legal security to hold their own. If they had such security, the statistical analysis of displacements given above will fall into line with the general situation and be a valuable comment upon it. If they had not, then the figures, while a useful guide to the imagination, may stand when they confirm, but hardly when they contradict, the picture given by contemporaries. The accounts of the latter, though still not freed from the charge of exaggeration, will be supported by what we know of the general disposition of economic and legal forces. They probably heighten the colour and sharpen the outlines, but their indication of tendencies will be correct.
In discussing the position of the small cultivator in the sixteenth century it was pointed out above that similarity of legal status was compatible with the greatest economic variety, and in considering their ability to resist attempted eviction it is essential to remember the converse truth, that tenants who were economically in a similar position were often from the point of view of tenure very different. Just as writers of the time lump together all classes of well-to-do small landholders under the name of yeomen, though the majority of them were not legally yeomen at all, so they constantly speak of evictions, ruinous fines, and rack-rents, without discriminating between the different [classes] of tenants whose different legal positions make them liable to suffer in very different degrees. One must remember, again, that in the sixteenth century a man might be called a copyholder because he held a copyhold tenement, but at the same time he might have, and very often had, additional land which he had leased from the demesne or from the waste, and in which his legal interest was quite different; he might be a freeholder and at the same time be the farmer who leased the lord’s demesne, or he might be freeholder, copyholder, and leaseholder in one, and even hold at the will of the lord other land which he had been allowed to occupy “by grant of the court,” for example part of the manorial waste. Hence not only were the positions of tenants at will, lessees, and copyholders considered as classes, different from each other, but there was also a difference in the legal interest which individuals had in different parts of the lands which they cultivated. Even if the law gave protection to copyholders, a point to be discussed later, they might suffer from the consolidation into large farms of those parts of their lands which they did not hold by copy, and the more they had gained in preceding years by adding to their holdings of customary land by leasing part of the demesne and of the waste, the heavier would be their loss when these additions were taken from them, while those whose holdings consisted entirely of such encroachments would be altogether ruined. Again, on those few manors where tenure at the will of the lord had not crystallised into copyhold, the tenant's position was even weaker than that of the lessee, for there was nothing but a custom unenforced by legal documents to prevent his eviction.
There was thus opportunity for a considerable displacement of population without any need of raising the difficult question of the degree of security enjoyed by copyhold tenure. When a manor was occupied only by tenants at will without copies, or when its demesne lands were leased for short terms to a number of lessees, or when its waste had been gradually taken in either by new settlers or by the customary tenants, land could be resumed by the lord without any conflict save, in the first case, with a custom which two centuries before had been powerful but now was weak, and in the second case with a terminable interest. It is not necessary to adduce instances to prove the liability of the tenant at will or lessee to eviction, because the nature of their interest makes it obvious that they could not claim to have complete legal security. Examples of the first kind are, indeed, not very common, owing to the fact that by our period tenure at will of the lord had in most places hardened into copyhold, and their comparative rarity may suggest that tenants at will who had not become copyholders had been displaced on most manors by the beginning of the century. The case of two Wiltshire manors may serve to illustrate their position. At Knyghton[491] the whole manor was in 1554 leased to a farmer, and with the manor the rents and service of six customary tenants holding at will. At Domerham,[492] in 1568, almost the whole of the land was in the hands of three large farmers, but “it has been granted to Richard Compton, Thomas Pryce, John Pryce, and Robert Kynge, to sow of the above said land every year 120 acres.” In the second case the precariousness of the tenants' position is obvious; they are mere squatters, who are there, as it were, on sufferance. In the first case it has been recognised and mitigated, as far as the farmer is concerned, by a clause in his agreement binding him to leave the tenants in peaceable enjoyment as long as they pay their rents. But they have no security as against the lord, and are liable to immediate eviction if it proves more profitable to add their holdings to the large farm. When tenants commence an action against a lord for wrongful disseisin, it is sufficient for him to answer that they are “but his tenantry at wyll.”[493]
Much more numerous, however, than the tenants at will, were the small leaseholders who held part of the waste or of the demesne lands. A glance at the table given on page 25 will show that they form about 12 per cent. of the whole manorial population therein represented. But in parts of the country their numbers are far greater. In 1568 they form 20 per cent. of the landholders on four manors in Somersetshire and one in Devonshire.[494] In two villages in Northamptonshire[495] they form nearly two-thirds. On the great manor of Rochdale there are in 1626 as many as 315 leaseholders to 64 freeholders and 233 copyholders. Leaseholders possessed, of course, legal security during the period of their leases, and these were in some cases for as long as ninety-two years. But they, too, had not an interest in the land of the kind which would enable them to offer any permanent barrier to the policy of consolidating holdings. This fact, indeed, was the motive for the care which surveyors showed in discriminating between those parts of the tenants' holdings which were customary land and those which were made up of pieces taken from the demesne or from the waste, as well as for the desire to convert copyhold tenure into leases for years, which was often shown in the sixteenth century by the manorial officials. For an example illustrating the eviction of numerous small tenants who had leased the demesne we may recur to the case of Ablode[496] which has been mentioned above. The lease of that manor to a farmer made by the monastery of St. Peter’s in 1516 expressly provided that he should be allowed to get rid of the lessees, to whom the demesne lands had previously been let, as soon as their leases should have expired. Two other examples show the same class encountering exactly the same difficulty under somewhat different circumstances. The first, which relates to the waste, not to the demesne lands, comes from a survey of the lordship of Bromfield and Gale which was made by the Parliamentary surveyors in 1649.[497] “The inclosures before mentioned,” they say, “and all the rest of them within the lordship of Bromfield and Gale, fall to the lord of the soyle, because enclosed without license. For although by their fee farm estate they [i.e. the tenants] may challenge freedome of commoning, it is by the covenant of the grant as formerly and antiently was accustomed, so that they must take a new grant of all (except some old inclosures which are included in their fee farms), which is the custom of the lordshippe. And if they should enclose all their common, yet the lord would have a third part.” The second illustration is given by a petition which some leasehold tenants of Whitby Strand[498] promoted in the Court of Requests in the year 1553. When the monastery of Whitby was dissolved, its property passed first to the Crown, which disposed of it to the Duke of Northumberland, who in turn sold it to Sir John Yorke. The sufferings of the tenants may be told in their own words: “Which saide Sir John, of his extort power and might and by great and sore threatenings of the said tennants ... hathe gotten from them all the leases ... and unreasonably hathe raised rents ... and in consideration also that the said Sir John York is a man of power and might, landes, goodes and possessions; greatly frendid.... Your poor oratours ... are not able to sue against him,” and petition the Court for redress. The reality of their grievance is shown sufficiently by the fact that whereas, when the estate was in the hands of the monastery, the total rents of twenty-six tenants amounted to £28, 19s. 8½d., an average of about £1, 2s. 1d. per tenant, by the date of these complaints the rents alone, apart from fines, had been forced up to £64, 9s. 9d., averaging per tenant £2, 6s. 6d.
What is the conclusion to be drawn from these three examples? It is surely the special precariousness in the conditions of the sixteenth century of all those tenants whose livelihood lies mainly in land which has been taken from the demesne or from the waste, which is, in fact, in the words of Fitzherbert,[499] “a new thing that hath not gone by custom,” a thing which may “fortune to increase or decrease of rent.” A piece of demesne may have been let out on lease at a low rent in the year following the great plague, or have been taken from the waste at an even earlier date. It may have remained in the hands of one family for a century without being resumed by the lord, and without any attempt being made to increase the tenants' payments. It may have been cleared and cleaned, hedged and ditched, by the sweat of generations. But, if the manorial officials have done their duty, that land has been marked as a “new thing,” something for which no custom can be pleaded and which no prescription can protect. When the lord wishes to alter the condition of its tenure no vested interest can stand against him. He will throw it into a large farm, or double the rent, and the tenants can say nothing; for they are mere lessees, unprotected by the sanctity of manorial custom, and to have his way he need only wait till their leases expire. That this is no impossible supposition is shown by the records of the manor of Hewlington.[500] In 1562 an inquiry was made into the rights of the tenants there, who seem to have been lessees for the term of forty years with a right of renewal to the heir. On investigation being made by the officers of the Crown, to whom the manor belonged, it was found that there was “a decay of the sum of one hundred and five pounds, six shillings, yearly rent, which in ancient tymes had been answered for the said landes"; which decay “as by the auncient records appeareth, did growe by reason of the great mortalitie and plague which in former tymes had been in the reign of Edward III. and also of the Rebellion of Owen Glendower and trouble that therefrom ensued; ... by reason of which mortalitie and rebellion the country was wasted, the Tenants and their houses destroyed, insomuch that the then lords of the soyle were constrayned by their stewards and officers to graunte the said landes at a lesser rent than formerlie was paid for the same to such as could be gotten to take it.” Two hundred years after the great plague, its effect in reducing the rents of a few tenants on the Welsh Border is remembered: a commission calculates the sum due to the last penny, and is then required and authorised “to revise the said decayed rent,” a fact which the jurors of the manor duly record in their presentment made another sixty years later. No doubt the Crown has an unusually good memory—nullum tempus occurrit regi. But what the Crown can do on this grand scale the surveyors of smaller lords do on a smaller one. As soon as the time has come when it is convenient to get rid of tenants, nothing but the most unassailable title can stand against the proof that such and such a plot of land was once part of the lord’s demesne or of the lord’s waste. And this, one may suspect, was a great change, which affected many families who thought themselves as safe as their neighbours. For at least two centuries before enclosing became general enough to cause alarm, the demesne and waste lands on one manor after another had been nibbled away by small encroachments; for lords had been glad to find an alternative to the cultivation of the former through labour services, and the colonising of the latter, though sometimes a source of complaint with commoners whose rights of pasture were curtailed, was welcomed by the manorial authorities as a means of improving lands which would otherwise be useless. Both together had been in fact a sort of reservoir of land upon which any surplus population could draw, and from which the more prosperous of the customary tenants could lease additions to their holdings in the manner described above. In our period the tendency is reversed. A lord is anxious to get rid of the obstruction which the small farmer’s lease offers to the consolidation of holdings. He wishes to follow the advice of experts and “reduce his demeans into one entier ferme.”[501] Titles are questioned, and the small lessee, whose interest is a terminable one and unprotected by any manorial custom, is the first to suffer.
(b) The Copyholders[ToC][502]
But were the tenants at will and the leaseholders the only classes to be evicted? No allusion has yet been made to the most difficult problem which confronts the student of the sixteenth century agrarian changes—the degree of protection enjoyed by the copyholders. If this problem is the most difficult it is also one of the most important. As far as can be calculated, the copyholders far exceeded in number upon most manors all other classes of tenants together. Copyhold tenure was the rule, and tenure at will and leasehold were generally the exception, though the latter was an important exception. If all copyholders had complete security, and were readily protected in their holdings by the courts, there would be little sense in talking of an agrarian revolution; for the changes, though they might still have caused much individual suffering, could hardly have constituted anything like the serious national danger which they were thought to be by many contemporaries. Again, the copyholders were in a special sense the kernel of a manor, the representatives of an ancient social system, around which the newer relationships of leasehold were, so to speak, comparatively modern accretions. It was with them and their business that the manorial courts were concerned; a copyhold tenement could not exist apart from a manor because surrender and admission in the manorial court was essential to its recognition as copyhold; and the very name of “customary tenants,” by which copyholders were often described, suggests the special antiquity and fixity of their position. Even in the sixteenth century there were still manors where there were no tenants at all except copyholders, and the mere shedding of the outer layers of small leaseholders, who had sprung up around them, would have left the organisation of such manors quite intact. It would have cut back recent developments; it would not have shaken rural society very seriously. One’s view of the importance of the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century will depend, therefore, to a great extent, upon the opinion which is formed of the legal position of the copyholders.
The problem centres in the question to what extent a copyholder who was threatened with eviction could obtain protection from the courts. It is not at all easy to extract a definite answer on this point from the writers of the period, whose views as to the degree of security enjoyed by copyhold are often inconsistent with each other, and sometimes seem to be inconsistent with themselves. The layman certainly thought that copyhold tenants could be and were evicted, and this view seems to be supported by Fitzherbert.[503] It is true that he draws a sharp distinction between the customary land, the rent of which cannot be altered, and the new intakes from the waste or the demesne, the rent of which can be forced up at the lord’s pleasure. But he expressly states that copyhold tenants cannot get protection from the courts: “These manners of tennants shall not plede nor be impleded of their tenements by the king’s writte"; and he implies elsewhere that the lord can increase both rent and fines. Kitchin,[504] on the other hand, thinks that the lord can never increase the amount of the admission fine; while Coke,[505] in a well-known passage, emphasises the copyholder’s security as long as he makes no breach in the custom by failing in his services, and points out that he can protect himself either by proceedings in Chancery or by a writ of trespass.
It is not surprising, in view of the variety of opinion as to the copyholders' status which obtained in the sixteenth century, that there should have been much disagreement about it among historians. It seems possible, however, at any rate to narrow the limits of conjecture by ruling certain theories out of account. In the first place one can hardly now accept the view put forward by Mr. Leadam,[506] that, at any rate after 1467, all copyholders had complete legal security, as complete, it would appear, as freehold, though guaranteed by different remedies. He holds that copyholders who occupied customary land, and who were “tenants at will according to the custom of the manor,” could get redress either by petition in the Court of the lord with an appeal to Chancery, or by an action of trespass in the Common Pleas, the classes who suffered from eviction being “tenants at will at Common Law,” who, though sometimes described as inferior copyholders, were not really copyholders at all, because they did not occupy the lands set apart as customary lands. This view, according to which the lord could clear off his estate all the newer copyhold tenancies on the demesne or waste, but was debarred by the courts from touching the tenancies on the customary land of the manor, receives a certain support from the great pains shown by the manorial authorities in distinguishing between the two. But, while it rightly emphasises the special features of the tenure of customary land, it is difficult to reconcile what we actually know of the position of copyholders with this theory as to the complete security of copyhold tenure. To the objection that contemporaries who could hardly have been mistaken certainly supposed that copyholders suffered, Mr. Leadam would, no doubt, answer that they were thinking of the “inferior copyholders" who held pieces of the demesne or waste. But this answer has got to meet difficulties which are really overwhelming. On the one hand, the historical confirmation which Mr. Leadam seeks, by trying to trace the distinction postulated back into the remote regions of tenure in villeinage, can no longer be accepted now that the difference between villeinage “regardant” and villeinage “en gros,” on which he relies, has been proved to refer not to differences in the tenure by which the serfs held their lands, but simply to different methods of pleading, which have nothing to do with the question of the tenant’s security, but merely with the form in which cases were argued in the courts.[507] On the other hand, it cannot be made to fit the facts of the copyholders' position in the sixteenth century. The truth is that copyholders were not safe even on the sacred customary land itself. It is quite certain that a great many copyholds were not copyholds of inheritance, but copyholds for life, which returned into the hands of the lord with the death of every tenant. It is certain also, as will be shown later, that fines for admission to customary holdings were on some manors raised enormously during the sixteenth century. How can one reconcile these facts with the view that the lord could make no alteration in the treatment of the customary land which would jeopardise the copyholders' interest?
Nor is it easy to accept the sharply contrasted theory of Professor Ashley.[508] Where Mr. Leadam sees absolute security of tenure guaranteed by the courts, Professor Ashley sees absolute insecurity mitigated by a once powerful but now decaying custom. In the past, when the lord’s land had been dependent on labour services for its cultivation, the last thing he wanted to do was to get rid of the tenants, and therefore custom had made it a rule of practice, though not of law, that first villein, and then copyhold, tenements should pass in the manorial court from father to son. But just when this custom was on the way to become law through the action of the courts in extending protection to copyholders, changed economic conditions made pasture farming much more profitable than tillage, and so supplied landowners with a strong motive for breaking it down. In the struggle which followed custom and public opinion were on the side of the tenants, but the law was on the side of the landlords, and copyholders were evicted without being able to obtain any legal redress, not merely through ignorance or intimidation, but because no legal protection was offered them by the courts. There is perhaps only one serious objection to this ingenious theory. But that is insuperable. It is that in certain circumstances, at any rate, the courts did in fact offer protection to copyholders who were threatened with eviction. In the fifteenth century a considerable number of cases came before the Court of Chancery. In the sixteenth century the same business, which in view of the number of copyholders must have been a lucrative one, came before the Common Law Courts. The case of the year 1482,[509] which is quoted by Professor Ashley to show the hesitation which the judges felt as to whether a copyholder had any legal remedy, is really one of a long series in which the courts considered the claims of copyholders, and which Coke must have had in mind when he said, “Now copyholders stand upon a sure ground: now they weigh not their lord’s displeasure, they shake not at every sudden blast of wind, they eat, drink, sleep securely ... let the lord frown, the copyholder cares not, knowing himself safe, and not within any danger.”[510] To overlook that series of cases is really to misread a change of the first importance, a change which almost amounted to a legal revolution. Suppose that at the present day the courts were to begin to protect the “tenant right" of workmen who have given their lives to a trade by ruling that any man dismissed after fifteen years continuous service should either be reinstated or receive compensation? The change would be greater—but would it be much greater?—than the momentous departure that was made by the judges who for the first time decided that a man impleaded for a villein tenement should have an action in Chancery. For centuries such actions could not be brought, and if brought would have been simply sent back to the court of the manor with the endorsement “our lord the king does not interfere in matters of villeinage.”[511] Now the tide is reversed. From 1439 onwards a stream of equitable jurisdiction flows out from the Chancery to secure the title of the very class which has hitherto had no legal title at all. Tenure in villeinage becomes copyhold. Clearly the discovery of these cases by Dr. Savine[512] must alter the whole standpoint from which we view the struggle between lords and copyholders in the sixteenth century. If one must reject the view of Mr. Leadam that copyholders on customary land had complete legal security, one must also, it would seem, reject the view of Professor Ashley that the courts never interfered in their favour. Somehow or another one must reconcile a good deal of insecurity with a good deal of protection, the complaints of contemporaries that copyholders suffered from enclosures with the equally indisputable fact that they were fairly often protected by the law.
A way leading some distance through this apparent contradiction may, perhaps, be found by recurring to that dependence upon manorial custom which is the characteristic feature of copyhold. A copyholder is a tenant by copy of Court Roll according to the custom of the manor, and this custom is primarily what regulates his rights and obligations. The custom must be an immemorial one; mere prescription is not custom; to be binding it must have “been used time out of mind.” Given such a custom, it is this upon which the nature of the copyholder’s tenure depends; and it is noticeable that authorities who differ as to the practical outcome of it, all agree that it is with custom that the first appeal lies. But the custom of a manor is a particular and individual thing peculiar to that manor, and determining the relations between lord and tenant there and not elsewhere. In the words of a surveyor, “Their customs are not so universall as if a man have experyence of the customs and services of any mannor he shall thereby have perfect knowledge of all the rest, or if he be experte of the customes of any one mannor in any one countie that he shall nede no further enstruccions for all the residewe of the mannors within that countie.”[513] There are several different sets of customs, and therefore several different sorts of copyhold. There are, in fact, copyholders and copyholders, and there is no general law of copyhold because its essence is to be local and peculiar. The first question, therefore, which has got to be asked, when considering the question of the legal security of copyholders, relates to the custom of the manor on which they are found; for probably, if the parties go to law, this is the first question which will be asked by the court. If it is shown that in getting rid of a tenant the lord has broken the custom of the manor, there is much likelihood in the sixteenth century that the court will restore it. If this is not shown, there is little probability that the court will go behind the custom in favour of the tenants, or try to harmonise it with general principles of equity, except in so far as it declines to take account of customs which are held to be “unreasonable,” a word too vague to be much protection to a tenant or much hindrance to a lord. It is this tremendous importance of local custom which causes it to be so minutely entered in manorial documents, and which results both in the constant appeals which are made to it when cases come before the courts, and in the careful recording of contradictory opinions. Surveyors are at pains to emphasise the difference between land which is customary land and land which is not, because, while on the former the introduction of new conditions will be followed by all sorts of friction and disturbance, on the latter the tenants will have no case in opposing them. It is here that Mr. Leadam's distinction between holders of customary land and holders of land taken from the waste or the demesne becomes of real value. It is a particular exemplification of a general rule, the rule that the appeal is always to custom. The meaning of the distinction is not, as Mr. Leadam seems to suggest, that copyholders on the former always had legal protection and copyholders on the latter always had not. It is that the crucial question is always, “What sort of custom are you under?" and that, while on the customary holdings the custom may be unfavourable to the tenant’s security, it is much more likely to be unfavourable on the newer tenancies formed on land which, perhaps within the memory of persons living, was indubitably the lord’s own, not merely in the general sense in which even the villein’s land had been the lord's, but in the practical sense that it was part of his demesne to use as he pleased. In fact quite a common answer when copyholders bring an action is the statement that the land in question is not ancient copyhold but part of the demesne;[514] and when the Protector Somerset applied his popular agrarian policy to his own estates he had to get Parliament to pass a special Act to give the copyholders on his demesnes peculiar security.[515]
The significance of custom is shown in other ways as well. In the numerous petitions in Chancery addressed by copyholders their demand is constantly for a recital or confirmation of manorial customs, and the same line is taken in the fewer cases which come before the Courts of Common Law. Tenants who claim an estate of inheritance and a fixed fine on admission refuse in a body to show their copies to the surveyors, presumably for fear that, if they do, some excuse may be made to upset the custom.[516] Tenants will perjure themselves as to the nature of the custom of their manor in order to be thought to have estates of inheritance. In the days when copyholders (if they exist at all) are still very few and villeins many, men who are really villeins of St. Peter’s of Exeter come forward and swear falsely that they hold in socage, “intending all to say that they hold and ought to hold de stipite in stipitem, Anglice stock after stock";[517] but the falsehood is exposed, and they are punished with a fine of 30s. The copyhold tenants on the Northumbrian manor of Amble claim in the sixteenth century that manorial custom requires that the next of kin of the whole blood shall succeed his father, and that the fines shall be limited to two years' rent. But the surveyors repudiate their claim, remarking that “we cannot find that they have any such estate of inheritance.”[518] Elsewhere the copyholders are more fortunate, and succeed in inducing the manorial authorities themselves to make formal admission of the custom, or in proving its existence to the satisfaction of the courts. In 1567 the Dean and Chapter of Winchester Cathedral, and the one hundred and fifty-eight copyhold tenants on their manor of Crondal, enter into a solemn covenant and bargain—may we not call it a “collective bargain"?—whereby it is agreed that fixed rents, fixed fines, and copyholds of inheritance, “shall be from henceforth for ever accepted, reputed, deamed, and taken to be vearye trewe, just, certaine, and auncient customs, rights, dewtyes, and useages, between the Lorde and the Customarye tenants ...; and shall from henceforth stand, contynewe, remayne, and be of perfect force and strength to conclude and bynde the said Deane and Chapiter, their successors and assignees of the said mannour and hundred and everye parte thereof for ever.”[519] The tenants at Elswick[520] go to law with the lord of the manor on the question of the nature of their estates, and, on the records of a custom requiring the admission of a son on his father’s death being produced, the custom is confirmed by the court. Even the Government of Elizabeth, favourable as it was to the small man, would not intervene without first being informed of the nature of the custom. When a tenant appeals to them for protection, they refer the matter to the local justices, with a request to “certifie their opinions of the poor man’s right.”[521] No doubt once the Courts begin to interfere with the internal business of a manor they tend to break down some of the peculiarities of local custom, and to set up a general pattern of copyhold tenure by ruling out certain customs as “unreasonable.” Copyholders for life may not cut down timber,[522] though perhaps copyholders of inheritance may. Two and a half years' rent is held by the reign of Charles I. to be an unreasonable fine, one and a half years' to be reasonable, and the heir shall not forfeit his copyhold if he tenders such a sum when he demands admission.[523] But the definition of what is meant by “unreasonable” has been going on from that day to this, and is perhaps not yet completed. In our period it was only just beginning. At any rate we shall not be far wrong if we say that, speaking broadly, the crucial question is always whether the custom makes it easy for lords to get rid of tenants or whether it makes it difficult. If an ancient custom gives the lord a free hand, he has little trouble in getting his way. If it restricts him, the courts are likely to enforce the restriction, and though the lord still has, of course, the option of extra-legal action by way of persuasion, cajolery, or intimidation, the tenants are likely to be protected by the law.
The dependence of copyhold upon manorial custom offers an explanation of the fact that the changes of the sixteenth century displaced copyholders, although the courts would intervene when a custom which gave them security was proved to exist. The most important questions with regard to the custom which determined the copyholders' position were two: first, whether he had by it an estate of inheritance, or merely an estate for years, for life, or for lives; second, whether his payments were fixed or unalterable, or whether they could be increased at the will of the lord. If it was not an estate of inheritance his holding returned fairly frequently into the hands of the manorial authorities, who could either renew it on the old terms, or lease it at an increased rent, or amalgamate it with a large farm. In the second case, where payments were variable, lords could force a tenant to throw up his land by placing a prohibitive burden upon it. The only way of ascertaining with accuracy the real position of copyholders in our period would be to show the relative proportions in which these four arrangements are found upon each of many hundred manors. And this we cannot yet do. The figures published by Dr. Savine[524] suggest that manors on which copyholders possessed an estate of inheritance, and those where they did not, were about equal in number, while manors on which the fines were uncertain predominated over those on which they were fixed in a proportion of more than two to one. Since it would seem that the ability of the lord to demand what fine he pleased could be used as a means of excluding a successor even when the copy was not merely for life or lives but from father to son, his investigations suggest that the copyholders' tenure was more often insecure than not.
To the examples which he has collected one may perhaps add certain others, inadequate though they are in point of quantity. Taking twenty-one[525] manors in the years 1568–1573, of which three are in Somersetshire, one in Devonshire, and seventeen in Wiltshire, one finds that on only one out of the whole number was the copyholders' estate one of inheritance. On one manor copies were granted for four lives or less—it is expressly stated that they are not to be granted for more—and on nineteen they are granted for three lives or less. On one manor (that where the copyholders had estates of inheritance) the fine was fixed by custom at a sum which is not stated, but which could not be increased. On the remaining twenty the fine was a variable one, the general formula being that land shall be given “for such fines as buyers can fix by bargaining with the lord or his officers, both in possession and in reversion,” which means that they were to be fixed by the higgling of the market. Turning next to two manors on the Welsh[526] Border, which were in possession of the Crown, one is told that in the reign of Elizabeth the royal officers granted the tenants leases for years, renewable at the will of the tenant, and fixed the fine at two years' rent, thus giving them what was virtually an estate of inheritance. It is possible, however, that the Crown tenants received more favourable treatment than did those on manors which were in private hands. From Northumberland, again, there is a good deal of evidence which it is difficult to summarise. Coke stated that “the customary tenants upon the borders of Scotland ... are mere tenants at will, and though they keep their customs inviolate, yet the lord might, sans controll, evict them.”[527] At the beginning of the seventeenth century an order in Chancery ruled that none of the tenants of Lady Cumberland,[528] who paid a fine on the death of lord and tenant, could have an estate of inheritance; and we have clear evidence that the fines paid by the copyhold tenants of the Earl of Northumberland[529] increased very considerably in the course of the sixteenth century. On the other hand such insecurity was not universal. A common rule on the Northumbrian border seems to have given a copyhold for life, with a tenant right of renewal to the heir, provided that a constant custom of renewal could be proved.[530] On the Crown estates in the reign of Elizabeth fines were fixed on conditions which varied from place to place; sometimes they were at discretion, sometimes one year’s rent, sometimes two years' rent; and in 1609 the tenants of twelve Tynemouthshire manors got the Courts to confirm a custom limiting their fine to a definite sum, on six of them to £2 on the admission of a descendant, and £4 on alienation, and on the remaining six to one year's rent in the former case and two years' rent in the latter.[531] On eleven out of thirteen manors in Norfolk[532] and Suffolk the fines are uncertain; on one, Wighton, they are said to have been fixed at 4s. per acre “by the space of 100 years at least"; on one, Aldeburgh, there is a curious distinction between the fines paid for land “in the fields," which are at the will of the lord, and the fines paid for cottage tenements, which are fixed at 2s. when the site is built upon and 1s. when the site is not covered. Elsewhere when the fine is fixed the ordinary payment seems to be usually two years' rent on descent, with sometimes a small addition, sometimes a small deduction, when the tenement is alienated during the tenant’s life. Estates of inheritance and fixed fines do not necessarily go together. The general situation on the small number of manors for which information has been obtained is set out below.[533] Table I relates to duration of tenancies, Table II to the character of admission fines. In each table, line (a) gives Dr. Savine’s figures, line (b) our own, line (c) the total of both together.
[Table XIII]
I
Duration of Tenure
| Manors. | Copyholds of Inheritance. | Copyholds for Years but with Right of Renewal (i.e. virtually Copyholds of Inheritance). | Copyholds for Life or Lives. | Copyholds for Years but without Right of Renewal (i.e. virtually Leases for Years) |
| (a) 82 | 25 | 17 | 40 | ... |
| (b) 60 | 22 | 2 | 33 | 3 |
| (c) 142 | 47 | 19 | 73 | 3 |