62 ENCLOSURES OF THE FIFTEENTH III 



look upon themselves as the successor of the copyholders, 

 and therefore as enjoying a right of property in the land. 

 This finally brings us to the copyholders of inheritance. 



Mr. Ashley, in his Economic History, asserted not only 

 that the customary sitting tenants were actually ousted, 

 which indeed, might happen, but ventures an opinion that 

 copyholders had at that time no legal security. In support 

 of his first assertion he refers to Sir Thomas Morels words 

 in the Utopia, ' that husbandmen be thrust out of their 

 own/ to Bacon's Henry VII, and to Crowley, 1 and points 

 out that in the majority of cases the lands enclosed were 

 thirty acres, or multiples or fractions of this area ; which, 

 as thirty acres was the ordinary holding or a copyholder, 

 looks as if those evicted Vvere copyholders. In support of 

 his second contention he quotes Lyttelton who, writing in 

 1475, says 'that copyholders though protected by the 

 custom of the manor, yet according to the Common Law 

 have but an estate at will/ It is true that copyholders 

 originally could not bring an action against their lords for 

 a recovery of their property in the King's courts, but in a 

 later edition of Lyttelton the oft-quoted opinion of two 

 judges, Bryan and Danby, in the reign of Edward IV, is 

 inserted to the effect that they had by that time the right 

 of bringing an action of trespass when ousted by the lord. 

 This interpolation, Mr. Ashley thinks, was probably taken 

 from the Year Book by the editor, who shared the general 

 indignation which evictions were at that time exciting, 1 

 and he further throws some discredit on the opinion of 

 these judges as being Yorkist partisans, and therefore 

 favourable to the cause of the poorer sort. 



This view, ingenious though it is, must however be, 

 I think, abandoned. Even Mr. Ashley allows that during 



1 Ashley, Economic Hist., bk. ii, c. iv, p. 273. 



