[494] _Ibid._, Paynton, Stooke Trister and Cucklington, Donyett, Chedseye, South Brent and Huish. The leases at South Brent are for ninety-two years.
[495] They are Duston in 1561 (R.O. Rentals and Surreys, Portf. 13, No. 23), and Paulspurie in 1541 (_ibid._, vol. ccccxix., fol. 3).
[497] MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of Survey of Lordship of Bromfield and Gale in Wrexham Free Library.
[498] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Requests_.
What is the conclusion to be drawn from these three examples? It is surely the special precariousness in the conditions of the sixteenth century of all those tenants whose livelihood lies mainly in land which has been taken from the demesne or from the waste, which is, in fact, in the words of Fitzherbert,[499] "a new thing that hath not gone by custom," a thing which may "fortune to increase or decrease of rent." A piece of demesne may have been let out on lease at a low rent in the year following the great plague, or have been taken from the waste at an even earlier date. It may have remained in the hands of one family for a century without being resumed by the lord, and without any attempt being made to increase the tenants' payments. It may have been cleared and cleaned, hedged and ditched, by the sweat of generations. But, if the manorial officials have done their duty, that land has been marked as a "new thing," something for which no custom can be pleaded and which no prescription can protect. When the lord wishes to alter the condition of its tenure no vested interest can stand against him. He will throw it into a large farm, or double the rent, and the tenants can say nothing; for they are mere lessees, unprotected by the sanctity of manorial custom, and to have his way he need only wait till their leases expire. That this is no impossible supposition is shown by the records of the manor of Hewlington.[500] In 1562 an inquiry was made into the rights of the tenants there, who seem to have been lessees for the term of forty years with a right of renewal to the heir. On investigation being made by the officers of the Crown, to whom the manor belonged, it was found that there was "a decay of the sum of one hundred and five pounds, six shillings, yearly rent, which in ancient tymes had been answered for the said landes"; which decay "as by the auncient records appeareth, did growe by reason of the great mortalitie and plague which in former tymes had been in the reign of Edward III. and also of the Rebellion of Owen Glendower and trouble that therefrom ensued; ... by reason of which mortalitie and rebellion the country was wasted, the Tenants and their houses destroyed, insomuch that the then lords of the soyle were constrayned by their stewards and officers to graunte the said landes at a lesser rent than formerlie was paid for the same to such as could be gotten to take it." Two hundred years after the great plague, its effect in reducing the rents of a few tenants on the Welsh Border is remembered: a commission calculates the sum due to the last penny, and is then required and authorised "to revise the said decayed rent," a fact which the jurors of the manor duly record in their presentment made another sixty years later. No doubt the Crown has an unusually good memory--_nullum tempus occurrit regi_. But what the Crown can do on this grand scale the surveyors of smaller lords do on a smaller one. As soon as the time has come when it is convenient to get rid of tenants, nothing but the most unassailable title can stand against the proof that such and such a plot of land was once part of the lord's demesne or of the lord's waste. And this, one may suspect, was a great change, which affected many families who thought themselves as safe as their neighbours. For at least two centuries before enclosing became general enough to cause alarm, the demesne and waste lands on one manor after another had been nibbled away by small encroachments; for lords had been glad to find an alternative to the cultivation of the former through labour services, and the colonising of the latter, though sometimes a source of complaint with commoners whose rights of pasture were curtailed, was welcomed by the manorial authorities as a means of improving lands which would otherwise be useless. Both together had been in fact a sort of reservoir of land upon which any surplus population could draw, and from which the more prosperous of the customary tenants could lease additions to their holdings in the manner described above. In our period the tendency is reversed. A lord is anxious to get rid of the obstruction which the small farmer's lease offers to the consolidation of holdings.