300 



A Court Leet. 



[July, 



deserting his own countryside for the towns or for the 

 Colonies. It is also true that all the time the most fit of the 

 agricultural labourers have been rising, the least fit of the 

 farmers and of the landowners have been falling. When such 

 a family comes down in the world its members have a ten- 

 dency to leave the old neighbourhood for the towns or the 

 Colonies, but I have myself known agricultural labourers whose 

 forefathers were farmers, and T have heard of others whose 

 forefathers were the owners of the land on which they worked. 

 This process of natural selection is surely healthy for the 

 countryside so long as it is not stimulated and made unnatural 

 by the operation of unwise or oppressive laws. 



My third impression was that a worse form of tenure than 

 a copyhold for lives has never been invented by the laziness ot 

 man. For consider how it operates — a copyhold is held for 

 three named lives from the lord of the manor. The holding 

 must have started some time or other, and then presumably 

 the first copyholder paid a handsome sum to the lord of the 

 manor, in return for which he w^as allowed to name three, 

 persons, and then for as long as one of those three was alive 

 he could not be called upon to pay any rent for the land, 

 though he had to make certain comparatively small payments 

 on stipulated occasions. The lives named were sometimes 

 those of local persons and at other times members of the Eoyal 

 Family or of well-known pubKc character. The Duke of Con- 

 naught's name, I was told, was often to be found in connection 

 with these Dorsetshire copyholds. When one of these lives 

 died the copyholder asked to be allowed to name another, for 

 which privilege he was prepared to pay a comparatively large 

 sum down. For the lord of the manor, who was the real 

 freeholder, this was a preposterous system.. Tn the course of 

 years it meant receiving occasional lump sums down and the 

 loss of an annual economic rent which would have added up to 

 a far larger sum. He was also relieved of all responsibility for 

 the land or buildings and cottages, and could not interfere with 

 the copyholder's treatment of the land or cottages. 



For the copyholder this would have been a very profitable 

 bargain if he could have been assured of its perpetuity; but a 

 day came when the lord of the manor returned to sanity and 

 refused to renew the lives, determined to regain control of his 

 own land when the last life lapsed, to put his property into 

 proper order and to let the farm at an economic rent. But 

 from the moment that he received the i-efusal of a renewal of 



