Copyhold

Abstract

The principal purpose of this chapter is to show how the tenant by copy of court roll evolved from a manorial tenant in villeinage, with no protection against his lord at common law, into a landowner with a property right enforceable in the central courts. The means was the action of ejectment, which rested on a lease of the copyholder’s possessory interest. This was settled in the King’s Bench by the 1570s, though the Common Pleas did not at first acquiesce. The copyholder’s estate was governed by the custom of the manor of which the land was held, and this gave rise to difficulties over its legal qualities, particularly with regard to entailed copyhold.