A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



the same experience of dishonest officials reeves, juries, 1 collectors, 2 bailiffs * 

 seemed to be leagued together to defraud their masters and at the beginning 

 of the fifteenth century the bishop and prior gave up the unequal struggle. 

 Henceforth the bishop and the prior became more and more simply the 

 landlords of vast estates, while the villeins developed into the copyholders and 

 leaseholders we find in the sixteenth century. 



It is impossible here to go into great detail over a process of mainly 

 legal interest, but a few of the steps in the transformation must be noted it 

 the later struggles between the chapter and their tenants are to be intelligible. 

 In the first place the feudal lawyers assumed that the legal owner of most of 

 the soil in the Palatinate was the bishop or the prior and convent. They 

 might have free tenants whose rights developed into legal freeholds, and bond- 

 tenants whose interest in their holdings became the point in dispute. In 

 historic times the bondagers fall into classes the tenants at the will of the 

 lord and the tenants for life. Whether or not the former represent the 

 original serfs is not very important, for the tenure became rare in its naked 

 shape, but the question of the tenant for life is more difficult. 



Before the Black Death there were more would-be tenants than available 

 holdings, but after 1349 the proportion was considerably reversed. The 

 holdings for life passed to the nearest heir of the dead holder. If he was not 

 known, a proclamation calling upon him to fine for the land was read at 

 three successive courts, and the jury decided which claimant, had the better 

 right if a dispute arose. If the actual owner abandoned his land the same 

 ceremony took place. After the third proclamation the steward could let the 

 land on his own terms to a suitable applicant, for it was ' in the hands of the 

 lord for want of a tenant.' Sometimes no tenant was available for many 

 holdings in the vill, and the lord was glad to commit the holdings to the 

 remaining tenants at low rent for a certain number of years or until a more 

 profitable tenant appeared. 



A distinction must be made at this point between the bondages held for 

 life (in which the tenant's right was defended by the law courts even against 

 the lord so long as he observed the conditions of his tenure) and those acres 

 of demesne or newly-inclosed waste which he only held for a term of years at 

 a money rent. As a general rule the lord was only too glad to renew the 

 lease after he had ceased to cultivate the demesne lands himself. In pros- 

 perous times he might try to get a little more rent, as he did when a fresh 

 letting of a bondage took place. 4 After 1349 the situation was reversed. 

 Tenants were often eager to give up their holdings and the lord was most 

 conciliatory in his dealings with the remainder. In the case of the bishop the 

 arrangements shown in Hatfield's Survey held good for a generation later 

 under Langley, but while the bishop's tenants agreed to take their holdings 

 for life, and developed rapidly into copyholders paying a small reserved rent, 

 it was quite otherwise under the prior. 



In the thirteenth-century rolls of the prior that have been preserved we 

 find that the usual formula for taking a bondage was : ' Thomas son of 

 Ralph took a bondage which his father held by rendering and doing the 



1 Dur. Curs. No. 12, fol. 223. * Ibid. No. 14, fol. 105. 



* Ibid. No. 12, fol. 2i\ ; Dur. Halmote R. (Surtees Soc. Ixxxii), 51. 

 4 Dur. Halmote R. (Surtees Soc. Ixxxii), i, 2, 6. 



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