Few old families were exempt from charges of treason if they chanced to take any part in public affairs or were known to have been stanch adherents to prohibited religion.
A bond is a small paper or parchment—on one side written in English, on the other in Latin—the promise to repay or pay money due; generally the bond is in Latin, and the conditions of it written in English. Bonds were made out on the sale of property, or for mortgages or legacies; they occur in numbers among family papers.
If the deed does not begin with the King’s name in whose reign it was made, the year of the reign will be found at the end. It must be remembered that Henry VI. and Charles II. are both puzzling, owing to civil wars, and both reckoned from the date of the death of the previous Sovereign. Henry VI. is reckoned from 1422, and includes the whole period till his death—forty-nine and a half years—of which only thirty-eight and a half years he actually was King. Charles II. is reckoned from the year 1649.
These are the principal kinds of deeds met with among family papers, being the commonest legal forms. If others are found of an unusual character they should be put aside for closer investigation when practice has given greater experience, or be submitted to an expert for examination.
CHAPTER VI.
MANOR AND COURT ROLLS.
The oldest account of an estate is to be obtained, not from deeds of purchase and mortgage, but from its own private records, called court rolls, a most curious class of documents, puzzling to the antiquary because they contain local words obsolete and not recognisable through derivation. Manor rolls are a study in themselves, a subject hitherto overlooked. They give us an insight into the most primitive form of local government, showing the manner in which lawlessness and disregard of laws were kept under before a regular magisterial jurisdiction came into existence. The local manor court occupied the position and did the work now undertaken by the magistrates, County Court judges, and County Councils. When complaints are raised as to an excessive imposition of fines for trivial misdemeanours by any of these modern means of justice, I would advise the complainants to study some old court rolls, wherein may be read the fines imposed for offences no longer punishable. The villager was fined if he kept dogs or pigeons, for trespass in the woods, stealing brushwood, for illegal fishing, for fighting, for allowing animals to stray and become impounded. Nor, unless he was a freedman, was he allowed to marry or give in marriage without his lord’s permission. All this sounds very arbitrary and severe; in reality it probably was not so. The bond between landlord and tenant must have been a very close one. They were drawn into near connection one with another; the well-being of one meant the welfare of the other. Nor was the meting forth of justice left solely in the hands of the lord of the manor, but rather to the twelve jurymen who formed the court itself. Certainly this self-government opened a means for unfair influence and revenge of petty quarrels. This was guarded against as far as possible. A very common item brought before the court was the accusation of wrongful information laid by a man against his neighbour in direct opposition to the ninth commandment.
There were two sections of manor courts—the Court Leet and the Court Baron. The former dealt with offences committed by the tenantry, and contained much that is entertaining and curious; the other was occupied with the tenants and their holdings, of which they had every year to give account to the lord of the manor. Upon the death of a tenant, or the expiration of the lease, new presentments were made to the landlord for admission to the premises, or a fresh life added to the lease from time to time. In these rolls we find notices of heriots and other old services due from the tenants of certain lands; indeed, these old customs are not yet wholly extinct, though they have frequently fallen into abeyance. On some estates heriots are still due, but, as a rule, have for many generations been compounded for by a money payment, just in the same way that feudal service passed into small sums of money and finally died out, or eventually took the form of money rent.
On many farms it was part of the rent to give the landlord yearly, geese or cheese. In a small farm of ours in Cheshire the tenant had to give a cheese yearly, cart coals, keep a dog and a fighting-cock for his landlord.