14 ORIGIN OF COMMONS. 
or bondsmen—hbecame 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. 
