SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



it might be physically cut up into as many as 24 scattered bits, was legally 

 one, and had usually one holder. The natural tendency to subdivision of 

 holdings with an increase of population, which would have found a wider 

 expression in case of free tenure, had led to two of the holdings being repre- 

 sented by groups of partners, and apparently to the actual subdivision of a third. 



During the reign of Henry III this situation underwent an entire 

 revolution. Each of the former holdings is now represented by a number of 

 tenants, several by three or four, others by eight, ten, or a dozen, one by a 

 score. The successors of the original holders have generally retained one or 

 two acres of each holding, and assumed the right of letting out the rest. 

 Many of the new tenants hold only a cottage, a rod of land, or one or two 

 half-acres. The population of Gorleston as a prosperous fishing village has 

 obviously increased, much more than doubled, and at first sight it looks as if 

 small holdings had become universal. 



On closer examination of the list, however, a new and still more inter- 

 esting fact emerges. The strips thus sub-let in any one holding are taken 

 generally each by a separate tenant, but a number of these tenants have also 

 taken strips in other holdings. Sometimes half a dozen of these new tenancies 

 are under the same name, and the name is generally that of a descendant of 

 one of the original holders of 1 2 acres. A single instance will serve to 

 illustrate the process that has been going on. A certain John Bond was one 

 of the villeins holding 12 acres in the time of Henry III. His son has let 

 2 acres to Matilda Bond, i acre to Thomas le Palmer and Alicia his wife, 

 and 2l acres to Margaret, widow of Roger Ruffi. He has let small plots of 

 land for building purposes to eight persons, who now hold five messuages and 

 four cottages upon them. In John Bond's own occupation there can hardly 

 be left more than five or six of his original i 2 acres. But while he has been 

 letting to others he has been entering upon new tenancies himself. He has 

 three half-acre strips from the holdings of three different neighbours, 3 rods 

 from a fourth, i acre from a fifth, two lots of i J acres each from a sixth and 

 a seventh, and another piece of unspecified size from an eighth, of the 

 original holdings.''^ The amount of land in his occupation is therefore 

 almost exactly the same as at first. But why should he have abandoned his 

 compact ancestral holding to replace it by this multifarious tenancy of frag- 

 ments } There seems but one answer possible. The compactness of the 

 ancestral holding was on paper only ; the land itself was scattered about the 

 village in probably as many as twenty-four pieces. He has abandoned half 

 of these in order that he might build up a more compact estate round the 

 other half by adding to them the strips of his neighbours that lay on either 

 side of his own in the open fields. And several of his neighbours have been 

 doing the same. So that in place of a few holdings of uniform size held on 

 servile conditions and cultivated on uneconomical principles, we have a great 

 increase of small holdings, the growth of compact holdings affording more 

 scope for enterprise and capital, and in both cases the servile conditions have 

 all but disappeared. 



Yet so great is the power of custom that more than three centuries later 

 the framework of the original system is still clearly discernible behind all the 

 changes of tenure and subdivisions of property. In the reign of Elizabeth 



" Hund. R. (Rec. Com.), ii, 167-8. 

 643 



