Copyhold

Abstract: T | 1HE opinion is not yet dead that rents lagged behind prices in Tudor and early Stuart England, landlords as a class being either impoverished or in difficulties. Views are still to be met, like that of Professor Earl J. Hamilton, who says that 'Precise data concerning the course of rents during the sixteenth century are lacking but for England reasonably satisfactory evidence indicates that rents lagged considerably behind prices. The Knight in Hales's Discourse of the Common Weal of This Realm of England (I549) repeatedly stated that the lag of rents behind prices had impoverished landlords.'2 The Husbandman, however, is not slow to ascribe the dearth to the raising of rents: 'I thincke it is longe of youe gentlemen that this dearth is, by reason youe enhaunce youer landes to such an height, as men that liue theron must nedes sell deare againe, or els they were not able to make the rent againe.' 3 In I548 William Forrest versified the same opinion.4 Some twenty years earlier William Roy was complaining of abbots who raised rents by halfagain and took excessive entry fines.5 In I550 Robert Crowley was continuing the plaint ofgreater fines and higher rents.6 In I587 William Harrison regarded it as usual for a farmer to have six or seven years' rent lying by him, although in the author's lifetime an old rent might have risen from /4 to 40,J50 or /ioo. He speaks also of fines being doubled, trebled or raised sevenfold and of 'such landlords as vse to value their leases at a secret estimation giuen of the wealth and credit of the taker ... so that if the leassee be thought to be worth an hundred pounds, he shall paie no lesse for his terme, or else another to enter with hard and doubtfull couenants. ' It was one of the demands of the rebels under Ket 'that copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it did in the first year of King Henry VII, and that at the death of a tenant or at a sale the same lands to be charged with an easy fine as a capon or a reasonable sum of money for a remembrance',8 After the Pilgrimage of Grace the King instructed his commissioners 'if any gentleman take excessive fines that their tenants cannot live... to labour to bring such ... extreme takers of fines to such moderation that they and the poor men may live in harmony'.9 Sir Thomas More remarks that 'there

Abstract: Few Byronists have felt comfortable with Rochdale. The poet's title was taken from the Lancashire parish (in 1643), but his links to Lancashire have always seemed tenuous.1 It has not always been clear what he owned in Rochdale, his only visit to the area was a brief stay at Hopwood Hall in 1811, and two of the key letters relating to the property were not included in Leslie Marchand's edition of Byron's Letters and Journals.2 Marchand included only nine references to the Lancashire properties in his threevolume biography, and recently Fiona MacCarthy managed just eight. Yet we have only to look at the Letters and Journals to see just how regularly Rochdale turned up in Byron's own thinking: Rochdale references take up nearly a column in the index. This paper is an attempt to sort out the Rochdale issue, partly by drawing on legal material in the National Archives.3 Rochdale posed a problem for Byron from the moment he came of age in 1809 until he died in 1824, largely because his holdings in the parish were tied up in a legal case which moved slowly through the Common Law courts until Byron abandoned it in 1822. His remaining interests were sold in 1823, but the transaction was finally completed only in 1828. The Byrons had once held extensive land and property in Lancashire, including several substantial houses. Much of this had gone by the seventeenth century, when they finally settled on Newstead as their chief seat and Nottinghamshire as their home.4 They retained the lordship of the manor of Rochdale, with various manorial rights, including royalties on coal and stone, tolls of markets and fairs, and fines on the transfer of copyhold properties. In addition, they owned shooting rights to grouse and other game on the moors. In the early eighteenth century the Rochdale estate brought them about £370 in rents, and another £290 or so from royalties.5 The rents gradually reduced, but the royalties assumed considerable significance. Between 1736 and 1798 the Byron family estates were in the hands of the 5th Lord Byron, the poet's great uncle and predecessor in title. He sold various estates in the 1770s to fund his increasing debts, but the common recovery, a legal mechanism he used to release land from settlement for sale, failed him after the death of his son William in 1776. The death of his grandson, William John Byron, in 1794, altered the situation. The estates carried a three-generational settlement from 1747, when Byron required an Act of Parliament in order to marry Elizabeth Shaw, an heiress who was under age at the time of the wedding. William John, his grandson, was the third generation in the settlement. With his death, the 5th Lord assumed he would gain powers of disposal over the family property. His lawyers advised that he could not sell any of the Nottinghamshire property - Newstead and those estates which had survived the 1770s sales - but he could sell his Rochdale possessions. Byron set to work disposing of assets. In all, he sold properties for a total of £2,370, leaving an income to the poet that was little more than £60 a year.6 This was the background against which the 6th Lord Byron inherited the estates in 1798. He was a minor - under the age of 21 - and he automatically became a Ward of Chancery. All the estates had to be administered on his behalf until he came of age in 1809. Chancery appointed trustees: Byron's distant relation the 5th Earl of Carlisle; his mother Catherine Gordon Byron; and Mrs Byron's preferred lawyer, John Hanson. Management of the estates was entrusted to Hanson, and even before he set out for the 5th Lord Byron's funeral at Newstead in the summer of 1798, he wrote what he described as a 'long letter to Mr Milne, the steward at Rochdale, for information on various particulars respecting the Lancashire estate'. Subsequently he was to be found 'perusing several voluminous deeds and many papers respecting the Rochdale estate ... and sundry letters from the agents to the late lord on the subject of Rochdale concerns'. …

Abstract: This thesis explores how rural society adapted to the fifteenth-century recession, and how this affected the ability of their sixteenth-century counterparts to respond to inflation. It does so through three primary sections: the first explores how the Bishops of Durham and the monks of Durham Cathedral Priory responded differently to the fifteenth-century recession and analyses the subsequently divergent development of their estates. By the seventeenth century, all of the Dean and Chapter’s lands were consolidated holdings on 21-year leases, whereas a confused mixture of copyhold and leasehold land had developed on the bishops’ estate. The second section explores the balance of landed power in the Palatinate of Durham from the late-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century amongst the laity. This further explores whether the ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ and the ‘rise of the gentry’ are misnomers more adequately phrased in terms of land usage as the ‘rise of agricultural producers’ and the ‘crisis of rentier landlords’. The final section explores how the tenantry of the above estates survived this period, with the gradual stratification of landed society and the emergence of the yeomanry as a social group. It especially focuses upon how the divergent development of the two ecclesiastical estates impacted upon the opportunities and challenges facing the tenants of Durham. The overall conclusion reached by this thesis is that estate management and institutional constraints were often crucial factors in the transformation of the English countryside: these two neighbouring ecclesiastical estates faced broadly the same problems and yet the composition of their estates diverged significantly across this period. Institutional constraints had a profound effect not only on levels of rent, but also the tenure of holdings and ultimately their relative size; three of the most important factors in the formation of agrarian capitalism.

Abstract: Earls Colne first came to the notice of historians through Macfarlane's study of its seventeenth-century vicar, Ralph Josselin, and then Macfarlane's use of evidence from the village in his The origins of English individualism (1978). This article presents preliminary results drawn from a computer-based reconstruction of the copyhold land market, 1546-1750, to contest Macfarlane's reading of the family-land bond in the manor. The familial possession of land over long periods is shown to be normal, and consistent with an active land market predominantly in smaller parcels. Little consolidation took place in the manor although some growth in holding size was achieved through subtenancy. Finally, the article asks whether the experience of copyholders is typical of the general.