court-roll

Updated: April 30, 2025

Steele entered the following among the local laws in the court-roll of the tenants and tenements. The copyholders were not to work for other masters without the leave of the lord. They were to work ten hours per day.

Thomas Clarkson - Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies : With a View to Their Ultimate Emancipation; and on the Practicability, the Safety, and the Advantages of the Latter Measure.

But here all must be liked; therefore all are beautiful. The very names would make out a sort of court-roll of Venus, and the book itself the enchanting effect of the goddess' embroidered girdle, which had the gift of inspiring love. This charm will doubtless ensure the volume hundreds of possessors.

Various - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction : Volume 20, No. 580, Supplemental Number

The preamble specified, that though, by an act passed in the eighteenth year of the present reign, it was provided, that no person might vote at the election of a knight or knights of a shire within England and Wales, without having a freehold estate in the county for which he votes, of the clear yearly value of forty shillings, over and above all rents and charges, payable out of or in respect to the same; nevertheless, certain persons, who hold their estates by copy of court-roll, pretend to a right of voting, and have at certain times presumed to vote at such elections; this act, therefore, ordained, that from and after the twenty-ninth day of June in the present year, no person who holds his estate by copy of court-roll should be entitled thereby to vote at the election of any knight or knights of a shire within England or Wales; but every such vote should be void, and the person so voting should forfeit fifty pounds to any candidate for whom such vote should not have been given, and who should first sue for the same, to be recovered with full costs, by action of debt, in any court of judicature.*

T. (Tobias) Smollett - The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. : Continued from the Reign of William and Mary to the Death of George II.

It had been customary for every well-to-do villager, whose tenure was by copy of court-roll, or in any way more permanent than that of the mere cotter, to keep a pair of these stools for the use of his own dead; but for the last generation or two a feeling of cui bono had led to the discontinuance of the custom, and the stools were frequently made use of in the manner described.

Thomas Hardy - The Woodlanders

The number of teams, the fines, the reliefs, the services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of oral tradition, came to be entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy of which became the title-deed of the villein. It was to this that he owed the name of "copy-holder" which at a later time superseded his older title.

John Richard Green - History of the English People, Volume I : Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216