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Updated: June 25, 2025
It may be well understood, therefore, why these interlopers, who ignored the ancient customary law of the country, and who by means of an alien code deprived the poor freeholder or copyholder of his land, or justified new and unheard-of exactions on the part of his lord on the plea that the latter might do what he liked with his own, were regarded by the peasant and humble man as robbers whose depredations were, if anything, even more resented than those of their old and tried enemy the plundering knight.
This copyholder was undoubtedly the descendant of the Welsh serf of mediaeval times. The first Reform Act, that of 1832, was won for the great manufacturing towns of England, but Wales benefited by it. It extended the franchise to the copyholder, and to the farmer paying 50 pounds rent, in the counties; it gave the towns a uniform 10 pounds household franchise.
Each shire town had one member, except that of Merioneth; and Haverfordwest was given a member. The county franchise was the forty shilling freehold; it therefore excluded not only those who had no connection with the land, but the copyholder who was really a landowner, but whose tenure was regarded as base, on account of his villein origin.
The copyholders, therefore, were the persons who increased the produce of the earth; but the exact account kept at the store prevented the produce from being misapplied as formerly. It could no longer be put down in the general expression of "given in allowances to the Negroes and the stock;" but it was put down to the copyholder, and to him only, who received it. Thus Mr.
Now the English copyholder held his land subject to the customs of the manor; his dues and services were fixed by local custom both as regards their nature and amount. What more easy, then, than to seek the local custom in Canada, and apply its rules to the decision of all controversies respecting seigneurial claims?
The last was practically the counterpart of the mediæval English copyholder. The Germans had undergone essentially the same transformations in social organization as the other populations of Europe. The barbarian nations at the time of their great migration in the fifth century were organized on a tribal and village basis. The head man was simply primus inter pares.
But in actual working the statute was interpreted in a more destructive fashion than its words were intended to convey. Up to this time all suitors who attended at the Sheriff's Court had voted without question for the Knight of the Shire, but by the new statute the great bulk of the existing voters, every leaseholder and every copyholder, found themselves implicitly deprived of their franchise.
Instead of completing their stipulated number of tenantry, the same persons often were admitted as tenants to different undertakers, and in the same seniory sometimes served at once as freeholder, leaseholder, and copyholder, so as to fill up the necessary number of each denomination. The whole scheme of colonization proved, in short, a miserable failure.
One of their number, Augustus Smith, a wealthy and obstinate man, a member of Parliament, and a possessor of rights on the common both as a freeholder and a copyholder, was induced to take action in his own name and as a representative of other claimants of common rights.
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