2 - Common Law and Manor Courts: Lords, Copyholders and Doing Justice in Early Tudor England

Summary

Introducing The Agrarian Problem of the Sixteenth Century, R. H. Tawney characterised the ‘problem’ of his title as a struggle between copyhold and leasehold. The ultimate triumph of the latter is confirmed by our familiarity with the terms of leasehold and leases: neither legal nor historical training is required to use the term in general conversation to refer to contractual tenures held for fixed terms and for fixed rents. Copyhold, on the other hand, belongs to a past era, an era in which tenures were ‘free’ or ‘unfree’, in which lords of manors held courts for their tenants, and in which custom within the manor was acknowledged as authoritative, independent of the common law enforced within royal courts. Emerging in the fifteenth century as the most common form of peasant tenure, copyhold acquired its name from the practice of giving a tenant a copy of the entry from the manorial court roll, which described terms on which the lord admitted the tenant and his heirs to the landholding. Those terms by the sixteenth century were routinely phrased ‘at the will of the lord, according to the custom of the manor’, and differences over interpretation of the copyhold title were, at least before the mid-sixteenth century, settled within the lord's manorial court, not in one of the common law courts presided over by the king's justices.