64 ENCLOSURES OF THE FIFTEENTH III 



It is, however, to be noted that these decisions are by no 

 means always favourable to the copyholders, who often 

 appear to be claiming rights which were not based on 

 custom, and that in interfering* in the question at all the 

 aim of these courts was, not to introduce innovations in 

 favour of the copyholder, but to enforce the custom TaTtFe 

 particular manor : to restore and give legal sanction to EEe 

 custom, and not to mend it. Now custom varied in every 

 manor, and thus the influence of the law courts was to 

 stereotype and to perpetuate that variety a variety which 

 is still an essential though perplexing characteristic of our 

 local life. 1 But although it seems pretty certain that any 

 eviction of a copyholder of inheritance, whose title was 

 clear, was illegal and would be resisted by the Courts, it 

 does not follow that there was no illegal eviction, as 

 know happened in the case even of tha freeholders 6F tj 

 Duke of Buckingham. On this point all we can say 

 that there is no^evidence of this being-done-Dnjan extensive 

 scale^jand it is noticeable that in most of the cases cited 

 before the law courts the lords of the manor always pleaded 

 some justification, which was generally upheld. Thus, in 

 one case we find the lord of the manor justifying the ousting 

 of his copyhold tenants for failure of contract or breach of 

 custom ; in another the lord declares that those he ousted 

 had wrongly pretended to be copyholders ; in another, the 

 grantee of monastic lands -stated that the prior had, just 

 before the Dissolution, fraudulently granted copies, while in 

 the manor o| Gamlingay a copyhold tenant forfeited for 

 demising to another without the lord's consent, and after 

 his death, on petition of his widow, his lands were granted 



1 Savine, Quarterly Journal of Economics, xix. 67 ff. ; Law Quarterly, 

 ix, p. 355, note ; cf. especially the everlasting disputes between Mulsho, 

 lord of manor of Thingden, and his tenants, Leadam, Transactions, 

 vol. vi. 



