+------------------------------+-----+---------+----------+----------+ | |Total| "Copy- |"Customary|"Tenants | | | |holders."| Tenants."| at Will."| +------------------------------+-----+---------+----------+----------+ | | | | | | |Northumberland | 436 | 362 | 45 | 29 | |Lancashire | 451 | 295 | 156 | ... | |Staffordshire | 272 | 170 | ... | 102 | |Leicestershire | 311 | 157 | ... | 154 | |Northamptonshire | 355 | 253 | 931 | 91 | |Norfolk | 596 | 536 | 45 | 15 | |Suffolk | 146 | 53 | 82 | 11 | |Wilts and Somerset | 817 | 786 | ... | 31 | |Hampshire | 251 | 251 | ... | ... | |Ten other manors in the south | | | | | | of England | 158 | 87 | 45 | 26 | +------------------------------+-----+---------+----------+----------+ | Total |3793 | 2950 | 466 | 377 | +------------------------------+-----+---------+----------+----------+
[101] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_. He continues: "For in some places of this Realme Tennants have no copies at all of their lands or tenements, or anything to show for that they hold, but there is an entry made in the Court Books, and that is their evidence."
These figures, one must repeat, are merely a summary of the entries in surveys and rentals. Probably they underestimate the number of copyholders, as we know that copyholders were sometimes entered as tenants at will or as customary tenants for the sake of brevity, while it is not probable that tenants at will who had not got copies were often written down as copyholders. One may suspect that this, rather than any difference of custom, is the explanation of the relatively small number of those who are returned as copyholders in Lancashire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, and Suffolk. Still, these figures do show the enormous preponderance of copyholders among the customary tenants, and show it all the more certainly if the number of copyholders is to be taken, as is probable, as the minimum. And this agrees with what we know from the incidental references of the writers of the time. Of 1000 tenants on the great ecclesiastical manor of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire "the most part" were said by Archbishop[103] Sandys in 1582 to be copyholders. Harrison[104] in 1587 spoke of copyholders as those "by whom the greatest part of the realm doth stand and is maintained." At the beginning of the seventeenth century Coke[105] could say that the third part of England consisted of copyhold. Copyholders, it is true, are far from being all of one type; for the essence of their tenure is that it depends on the custom of the manor which varies from place to place, and when we come to consider how far they have security against eviction these differences are of crucial importance. Still, in spite of the varieties of copyhold tenure, it is useful to know that to the bulk of the population in the sixteenth century landholding meant holding by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor. No account of the agrarian changes can stand for a moment which does not give full weight to the fact that, in most parts of England, the copyholders greatly outnumber all other classes of tenants.