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He marvelled what people could have been thinking about in the past to invent such precarious tenures as these; still more, what could have induced his ancestors at Hintock, and other village people, to exchange their old copyholds for life-leases.
The blood of the ancient English was not only tainted with the breath of that destructive age, but their lands also. The powerful blast destroyed their ancient freehold tenures, reducing them into wretched copyholds: and to the disgrace of succeeding ages, many of them retain this mark of Norman slavery to the present day.
The tribal authority of the chiefs was taken from them by law. They were reduced to the position of great nobles and landowners, while their tribesmen rose from subjects into tenants, owing only fixed and customary dues and services to their lords. The tribal system of property in common was set aside, and the communal holdings of the tribesmen turned into the copyholds of English law.
At the close of the Middle Ages the lord of a manor in England, though possessed of a larger proportion of the land than were his colleagues in other countries, but rarely could claim so much as one half of the acreage of a parish; the rest was common, in which his rights were strictly limited and defined, to the advantage of the poor, and also side by side with common was to be found a number of partially and wholly independent tenures, over which the squire had little or no control, from copyholds which did furnish him occasional sums of money, to freeholds which were practically independent of him.
They were ordinary leases for three lives, which a member of the South family, some fifty years before this time, had accepted of the lord of the manor in lieu of certain copyholds and other rights, in consideration of having the dilapidated houses rebuilt by said lord. They had come into his father's possession chiefly through his mother, who was a South.
Under the lords of manors, again, small freeholds and copyholds were held of various extent, often forty shilling and twenty shilling value, tenanted by peasant occupiers, who thus, on their own land, lived as free Englishmen, maintaining by their own free labour themselves and their families.
Deputed authority, guardianship, &c, not known to the Northern nations; they gained this idea by intercourse with the Romans. Jud. Civ. Lund. apud Wilk. post p. 68. Spelman of Feuds, ch. 5. Fuerunt etiam in conquestu liberi homines, qui libere tenuerunt tenementa sua per libera servitia vel per liberas consuetudines. For the original of copyholds, see Bracton, Lib. I. fol. 7.
The 'island' belonged to the Catholic priesthood of the place, who still exercise rights over it similar to those of the 'lords' in cases of English copyholds, and who obtain an annual revenue of some 30,000l. or 40,000l. from it.
He did not really require it, but constitutionally hated these tiny copyholds and leaseholds and freeholds, which made islands of independence in the fair, smooth ocean of his estates. 'Then an idea struck into the head of Netty how to accomplish her object in spite of her uncle's negligence.
These wages he fixed at such a rate, that "they should be more than equivalent to the rent of their copyholds and the rent of their personal services when put together, in order to hold out to them an evident and profitable incentive to their industry."
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