free-tenants

Updated: May 29, 2025

But in most cases, as far as can be judged now, the lord was methodical in releasing services due to him. Thus, by one of the many paradoxes of history, the freest of all tenants were the last to achieve freedom. When the serfs had been set at liberty by manumission, the socage-tenants or free-tenants, as they were called, were still bound by their fixed agreements of tenure.

Bede Jarrett - Mediaeval Socialism

Thus a body of hired laborers grew up claiming no land beyond that on which their miserable huts stood and possibly their small garden-plots. Besides hired laborers and free-tenants, a third group of peasants appeared in places where the noble proprietor did not care to superintend the cultivation of his own land.

Carlton J. H. Hayes - A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

These free-tenants, while paying regular dues, as did the others, were not compelled to work two or three days every week in the lord's fields, except occasionally in busy seasons such as harvest; they were free to leave the estate and to marry off their daughters or to sell their oxen without the consent of the lord; and they came to regard their customary payments to the lord not so much as his due for their protection as actual rent for their land.

Carlton J. H. Hayes - A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

As has been intimated, the manorial system was already on a steady decline, especially in western Europe, at the opening of the sixteenth century. A goodly number of peasants who had once been serfs were now free-tenants, lessees, or hired laborers.

Carlton J. H. Hayes - A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

While more prosperous peasants were becoming free-tenants, many of their poorer neighbors found it so difficult to gain a living as serfs that they were willing to surrender all claim to their own little strips of land on the manor and to devote their whole time to working for fixed wages on the fields which were cultivated for the nobleman himself, the so-called lord's demesne.

Carlton J. H. Hayes - A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

Of course rent of farm-land in our present sense each owner of the land letting out his property to a tenant and, in return, exacting as large a monetary payment as possible was then unknown. But there was a growing class of peasants who were spoken of as free-tenants to distinguish them from serf- tenants.

Carlton J. H. Hayes - A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.