[108] MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham, Billingford and Bintry MSS., No. 9, Foxley: "Native tenentium per copiam rotuli curiæ."
One may approach the question in another way, by looking at the circumstances of those exceptional manors on which the tenants at will are more numerous than the copyholders, and which are instructive just because they represent a variation from the general type. A case in point is the Manor of Knyghton in Wiltshire. On the majority of the manors held in that county by the Earl of Pembroke the copyholders are far the most numerous class, and on some they are the only class, among the customary tenants. At Knyghton,[109] however, there are no copyholders; all the customary tenants hold at the will of the lord, and when one examines the position and methods of agriculture more closely, one finds that they display several signs of being in other respects more antiquated and conservative than is the case in other parts of the same country; for example, all the holdings are either virgates of twenty-four acres or some fraction and multiple of a virgate, which is not at all common on other Wiltshire manors, and implies an unusual approximation to the conditions of the peasantry two centuries before. Is it unreasonable to conclude that this is a case of arrested development, and that Knyghton is a manor on which the tenants at will have never turned into copyholders, because for one reason or another it has lain outside the main stream of agricultural development?
[109] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke_.
The connection with copyhold tenure of some of the characteristic obligations and disabilities of villeinage points in the same direction. In spite of the general commutation of services into money payments, which Mr. Page's statistics show to have taken place before the middle of the fifteenth century, one still finds the attenuated records of labour rents surviving for many generations after the direct management of the demesne by manorial officials has been abandoned, and passing with the rest of the farm equipment to the farmer who takes it on lease. In Norfolk and Suffolk they seem indeed to have disappeared almost altogether, which is what one would expect in view of the fact that those counties were the Lancashire and West Riding of the period, and no doubt, even when labour services were still exacted, the farmer relied mainly upon hired labour. But it would be a mistake to regard the tenants' works as everywhere so trifling as to be of no economic importance. Often, it is true, they are inconsiderable. At South Newton,[110] for example, though the uncertainty which had been one of the marks of villeinage still survived among the copyholders in the shape of the duty of "gift carriage," the transport of such timber as was wanted to the lord's house at Wilton, the purely agricultural services were unimportant, and the tenants of every yardland had only to mow the farmer's meadow and to carry his hay. At Cuxham,[111] in Oxfordshire, on the other hand, the authorities were still getting twenty-eight boonworks in autumn from the copyholders at the end of the fifteenth century. On a Northumbrian[112] manor belonging to Tynemouth Priory down to the dissolution of the monasteries "every tenant did lead to the castle in the prior's time one load of hay, mow three several dayworks of hay, rake one daywork and sheare three severall dayworks in the corn in harvest every year." At Washerne,[113] in Wiltshire, the copyhold tenants' labours were in 1568 still quite an important affair: each holder of one virgate of twenty acres "shall plough three half acres for the lord's winter seed and shall harrow them, and also the aforesaid tenants shall wash and shear the lord's sheep ... and further each of them shall mow one acre of meadow ... and gather hay thence and prepare it.... Each of the said tenants shall reap one acre of wheat and he must bind the crop and carry it. Also each of them shall reap one acre of barley." On a Lancashire[114] manor in 1628 every plough hand is obliged to do two days' work in the year with a team on the demesne, and two days with a labourer. Such elaborate obligations as appears at Washerne are, it is true, the exception. But they show that in the middle of the sixteenth century there were still backwaters where the remnants of agricultural services were a not inconsiderable burden; and if their comparative lightness marks the progress from villeinage to a wage system, their survival as clearly shows that villeinage was the pit from which copyhold tenure was digged.