14 ORIGIN OF COMMONS. 



or bondsmen became freemen. Some of them may 

 have possessed houses and small plots of land inscribed 

 on the rolls of the Manor, which entitled them to 

 become Copyholders ; but the greater number of them 

 lived in cottages the property of the lord, or of the 

 free tenants of the Manor, and on their emancipation 

 from servitude continued as tenants, and did not 

 acquire rights of property in their cottages as Copy- 

 holders. They were the ancestors of the agricultural 

 labourers of the present day. It might be expected 

 that, on the emancipation of this class, the law would 

 have recognised as legal and valid the ancient customs 

 of the village communities, by which they enjoyed, in 

 fact, the privilege of cutting turf or wood, and of 

 turning out their cattle on the waste of the Manor. 

 The feudal lawyers, however, hesitated to recognise 

 such customs. 



It was not till the year 1603 that the claim of 

 the inhabitants of a village or Manor to the legal 

 recognition of that which they had always, in fact, 

 enjoyed by custom was finally negatived by the 

 Judges. A claim was made in that year by the 

 inhabitants of the village of Stixwold, in Lincolnshire, 

 to turn out cattle on the waste of the Manor according 

 to ancient custom.* The Judges unanimously held 

 that the custom pleaded was against the law, and 

 could not be sustained ; they assigned the pedantic and 

 technical reasons that the inhabitants of a district are 

 too vague a body to enjoy a right of a profitable 

 * Gateward's case, 6. Rep., 59. 



