[110] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke_.
[112] _Northumberland County History_, vol. viii., p. 220 (one may add that in parts of Northumberland the labourers are still called "bondagers"; Mr. Clay tells me that in the Calder valley farmers still use "daywork" as a unit for measuring fields). See also _Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery, temp. Eliz._, D. d. 2, 44, for a suit by a farmer to recover services due from tenants.
[114] _Chetham Society Miscellanies_, vol. iii.
More striking still, perhaps, is the persistence of disabilities of another kind. The old marks of personal bondage, chevage, merchet, leyrwite, liability to tallage, and the rest have almost disappeared. But traces of them are still found clinging to the copyhold tenants. Copyholders pay a fixed sum to be free of tallages.[115] They pay salt silver instead of the salt with which they had once been obliged to toil to the lord's manor-house; they are forced to act as the lord's reeve, and collect his rents, heriots, and strays. In one curious instance one finds something very like a tallage[116] being taken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, though of course that is not what it is called. The tenants are simply collected and told that they must help the lord to pay for an estate which he has bought, by giving him three years' rent apiece, that, if they do, no more gifts will be demanded during his lifetime, and that, if they do not, he will refuse to renew holdings as they fall in. Even merchet, the most hateful of all the incidents of villeinage, is something more than a mere memory. As late as 1620 the tenants of Holt[117] in Denbighshire thought it worth while to point out to the crown surveyor that "they are freed from payment of any sum of money upon the marriage of their daughters," and even in 1654 Leyrwite and childwite were still being paid by the heiresses of copyhold tenants on some of the Warwickshire[118] manors.
[115] Pembroke Surveys, Estoverton and Phipheld: "Tenentes de Estoverton reddunt annuatim pro pannagio et tallagio ... ivs." For salt silver, _ibid._, South Newton. For liability to serve as Reeve, _ibid._, Paynton.
[116] _Chetham Society Miscellanies_, vol. iii.: "I would wish you to call the tenants first all together and to signify unto them that my father and I have gone through with Mr. Ireland for Warrington, and the summe we are to give is above £7000; and this was done making no doubt that towards it every one of them being tenants would by their assistance enable us to finish it.... If they faile in this, they may provoke us to sharp courses, especially mee, who have had a purpose to take the third part of every living as it falls."