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Updated: June 12, 2025
The point of law Thurlow was called upon to resolve was, "Whether being a freeholder is an exception from being pressed;" and as Duncan was represented in counsel's instructions on what ground, other than his "appearance," is not clear to be a man Who habitually used the sea, it is hardly matter for surprise that the great jurist's opinion, biassed as it obviously was by that alleged fact, should have been altogether inimical to the pressed man and favourable to the Admiralty.
He confidently undertook to raise eight thousand pounds on every freehold estate of a hundred and fifty pounds a year which should be brought, as he expressed it, into his Land Bank, and this without dispossessing the freeholder. All the squires in the House must have known that the fee simple of such an estate would hardly fetch three thousand pounds in the market.
The franchises of the forty shilling freeholder, of the householder paying scot and lot, of the burgage tenant, of the liveryman of London, of the Master of Arts of Oxford, were respected. The sense of the constituent bodies was taken with as little violence on the part of mobs, with as little trickery on the part of returning officers, as at any general election of that age.
A very important fact in statistics may thus be gathered from the poll-books of this county, which proves it to be the healthiest part of Europe, a freeholder has not died in it for the last fifty years." "The 'Kiltopher boys' won't come this time; they say there's no use trying to vote when so many were transported last assizes for perjury." "They're poor-spirited creatures," said another.
It would seem not only as if the villein was striving to resist the reactionary tendency of the lords of manors to regain his labour service but that in the general overturning of social institutions the copyholder was struggling to make himself a freeholder, and the farmer to be recognized as proprietor of the demesne he held on lease.
In the chapter on Wit and Eloquence in Irish Bulls, there is a speech of a poor freeholder to a candidate, who asked for his vote; this speech was made to my father when he was canvassing the county of Longford. It was repeated to me a few hours afterwards, and I wrote it down instantly, without, I believe, the variation of a word.
That being accepted, there were several reasons to induce him to doubt the durability of our Parliament: the Crown possessed too great power in those assemblies: it was with difficulty that the great barons could be got to attend, their delight being to reside at their castles in the country, and take no part in political affairs; it was also difficult to get the representatives of the counties and boroughs to attend, on account of the long distances that many had to come, and the great expenses of their attendance; sometimes in a county the properly qualified person, an actual knight, could not be found, and there was no representative from a county, until upwards of twenty years after Bracciolini had left us, when esquires and gentlemen could be returned; sometimes a city or borough would not send a member, either by pleading poverty in not being able to pay the wages of the two representatives, or from not finding among their townsmen two burgesses with the qualifications required by the writ, that is, sufficiently hale to bear the fatigue of the journey, and sufficiently sensible to discharge the duties of close attendance on Parliament; for every member was then required to be present at the Parliament; hence each small freeholder from a county and each burgess had to find three or four persons of credit to be sureties for him that he would attend; and the constituents of each were forced to bear the cost of his attendance.
Since the paper was read, I have met with the following passage in Stubbs's "Constitutional History of England," vol. i., p. 265: "It has been maintained that a formal and definitive act, forming the initial point of the feudalization of England, is to be found in a clause of the laws, as they are called, of the Conqueror, which directs that every FREEMAN shall affirm, by covenant and oath, that 'he will be faithful to King William within England and without, will join him in preserving his land with all fidelity, and defend him against his enemies. But this injunction is little more than the demand of the oath of allegiance taken to the Anglo-Saxon kings, and is here required not of every feudal dependant of the king, but of every FREEMAN or freeholder whatsoever.
We have already noticed the effects of the increase of wealth in begetting a passion for the possession of land which makes this reign so critical a period in the history of the English freeholder; but the same tendency had to some extent existed in the preceding century, and it was a consciousness of the growing importance of this class of rural proprietors which induced the barons at the moment of the Great Charter to make their fruitless attempt to induce them to take part in the deliberations of the Great Council.
In New York "every male inhabitant of full age" who had resided within the county for six months immediately preceding the day of election could vote if he had been a freeholder possessing a freehold of the value of twenty pounds within the county or had rented a tenement therein of the yearly value of forty shillings, and had been rated and actually paid taxes to the state.
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