[251] Some copyholders, who held land which was not "customary land" but part of the demesne or the waste, were not protected by custom either: for a discussion of this point see below, pp. 293?-294.
[252] See below for an example from Crondal, p. 295.
[253] MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of "The Presentment and Verdict of the Jury for the Manor of Hewlington," 1620 (Wrexham Free Library, _Ancient Local Records_, vol. ii.): "Which decay (as by the ancient records appeareth) did growe by reason of the great mortalitie and plague which in former tymes had been in the reign of Edward III., and also of the rebellion of Owen Glendower and trouble that thereupon ensued."
[254] _Victoria County History of Gloucestershire_, Social and Economic History, p. 146. For agrarian strikes see below, pp. 329?-331.
If, then, we ask what the custom means to the peasantry, we must think not of the "forbidding, stale, and meagre ways," which is what the word custom too often suggests in the twentieth century, but of the phrase "ancient customs and liberties," which is so common in the charters of Boroughs. The custom of the manor is a body of rules which regulates the rights and obligations of the peasants in their daily life. It is a kind of law. It is a kind of freedom. And since it is the custom which most concerns the mass of the peasantry, it is not the state, or the law, but the custom of the manor which forms their political environment and from which they draw their political ideas. They cannot conceive the state except as a very great manor. Their idea of good government is the enforcement of an idealised customary.[255]
Having said this we can say little more. There is no standard by which we can measure civilisation, and if we knew more than we do, the village life of the sixteenth century--and England is all villages--would still be a mystery to us. Yet, before returning to the humbler task of examining economic conditions, we may perhaps summarise the sort of impressions formed of the peasants by those who knew them in their own day, impressions no doubt as misleading as a traveller's sketches of modern England, yet, like a traveller's sketches, possessing a certain value, because they show the points which an intelligent outside opinion selects for emphasis.