Such petty transactions among the peasantry were not, however, the only way in which substantial peasant properties came into existence. In addition to the transference of land from one tenant to another there were other causes working to produce much the same results. The first was the continuous taking in of plots of waste land by tenants who got permission from the manorial authorities to make encroachments upon it. The second was the abandonment of the system of cultivating the demesne by the labour rents of the tenants. Long before the enclosing of the common waste by lords of manors and farmers had become a very serious grievance--that it was a grievance at an early date is proved by the Statute of Merton[179]--one finds arrangements being made for bringing unused land under cultivation. Sometimes this movement goes on on a very large scale indeed; the Abbey of St. Albans gets a licence from the King in 1347 to "improve its wastes aforesaid and to grant and let them for their true value to whomsoever of their tenants comes to take them;"[180] and about the same time 500 acres of waste in the forest of High Peak[181] are let by the Crown to three tenants, much to the disgust of the neighbouring commoners. Usually the encroachments on the waste take place piecemeal. The process by which piece after piece was clipped off it and added to the tenants' holdings is shown very clearly in Rentals and Court Rolls. Occasionally it goes on without sanction; a tenant surreptitiously draws into his holding an extra piece of land for which he pays nothing, and is only found out when he has occupied it for some time. But this is rare, for such encroachments are a source of profit to the lord, both in the payment made for the original permission to make them and in the rent coming from them, and the steward is therefore careful that they should be made through the court and entered in detail on the rolls of the manor. Thus at Ashton-under-Lyne,[182] in 1422, both freeholders and customary tenants had made large intakes of wood and waste and were paying for some of them as much as 13s. 4d. and 10s. The Halmote Court of Colne[183] in 1324 shows many tenants paying a few pence for acres and half acres of waste. At Yateleigh,[184] in 1287, almost every one of the fifty-three customary tenants held, in addition to his land in the open fields, land taken from the waste amounting in the aggregate to 37 acres, while some possessed no land at all except that which they had thus reclaimed. In the tithing of Aldershot,[185] on the same manor, one tenant held 52 acres in encroachments. At Crokeham[186] another held 63-1/2 acres in addition to the standard half virgate of customary land; another, at Southwood,[187] 16 acres.