[137] Merton Documents, Rental of Malden.
[138] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 85.
[140] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke_.
[141] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke_.
[144] _Crondal Record_, Part I. (Baigent), pp. 210-221. Customary of 1567.
[145] All Souls Documents, Map and Description of the Manor of Edgeware (1597).
[146] _Ibid._, Map and Description of the Manor of Kingsbury (1597).
These examples are drawn from 12 different counties.[147] Let us see more exactly what they suggest. They suggest that, quite apart[148] from any movement on the part of lords of manors to throw the holdings of the customary tenants into large farms and to evict their holders, quite apart from any external shock such as was given to the organisation of village life by the change from tillage to pasture on the part of lords and their farmers, there has been going on an internal change in the relation of the customary tenants to each other. So far we have been concerned only with the result of that change, not with the process by which it is brought about. The result, as evidenced by the surveys, is the consolidation of several holdings, or parts of holdings, into fewer and larger tenancies, the appearance of a class of well-to-do peasants by whom such larger tenancies are held, and a widening of the gap between the most prosperous and least prosperous. Customary tenants hold 3 or 4 virgates, 80 or 90 or 100 acres, and their holdings are composed of holdings and parts of holdings which formerly belonged to several different tenants. Customary tenants even become the landlords of other customary tenants. At Yateleigh[149] one copyholder has as many as twenty sub-tenants, and it is not at all uncommon for the surveyors of the sixteenth century to record the names both of owners and occupiers in estate and field maps. There can hardly be a clearer proof of the re-arrangement of property which has been going on among them than the fact that some of them hold more land than they can cultivate themselves and sub-let it to smaller men, who become their sub-tenants.
[147] Similar examples could be adduced from Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, were it worth while, _e.g._ at Duston in Northants in 1561 there were tenants holding 2 virgates, 1-3/4 virgates, 1-1/2 virgates, 1/2 virgate, 1/4 virgate (R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Portf. 13, No. 23). At Desford in Leicestershire, _temp._ Hen. VIII., one finds the same division and aggregation of virgates (R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancs., Bdle. 6, No. 7).