[250] Aldeburgh, _temp._ Henry VIII., R.O. _Misc. Bks. Treas. of Receipts_, vol. clxiii. See Appendix I., No. II.
This brings us to our original point, the way in which the whole social environment of all the tenants, except the freeholders, who do not need the protection of custom, and the leaseholders,[251] who cannot get it, is dependent upon the custom of the manor. Fraught with modern associations as it is, the phrase "collective[252] bargain" is perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing what the custom of the manor means to the peasants themselves. Of course it is much more than this. The custom has the sanction of immemorial antiquity. The phrase "time out of mind" is no mere piece of idle rhetoric. The stable self-perpetuating conditions of economic life create a sort of communal memory, in which centuries are focussed. There were villages where, in the reign of Elizabeth, the effects of the Great Plague[253] were still dimly remembered. But regarding the matter from the point of view of the practical working of village life, we shall not be far wrong if we think of the peasants as a body of men who are more or less organised, and of the custom as a system of common rules which regulates the relations between them and the lord. And it is evident that the custom of the manor, at any rate in our period, is a safeguard of the tenants' interests rather than of those of the manorial authorities. It is not only that the changes which followed the Great Plague have set the peasants free from the most irksome customary restrictions, but, further, that, in the sixteenth century, it is the lord who wants to make innovations and the tenants who resist them, and that it is therefore the latter who stand to gain most by clinging to custom. The custom sets up a standard by which encroachments can be opposed, by which the village as a whole can put a solid barrier in the way of change, by which blacklegging (in the shape of one man taking a holding over the head of another) can be prevented. Competitive forces have, it is true, been gradually undermining custom, and by the sixteenth century an increasing number of tenants have the terms on which they take their holdings settled by the higgling of the market without reference to any authoritative rule. Nevertheless, as far as the copyholders, who are the kernel of the manor, are concerned, competition is held in check by the fact that, on certain fundamental matters, there is a common understanding between the peasants, which is recognised by the lord himself. The manorial authorities cannot bargain with the tenants one by one. They have to deal with the villagers as men who are "organised," who are members of a society, who know what they have to expect in the way of heriots and rents and fines, and who will be supported by village opinion in resisting innovations. On occasion the peasants will strike. On occasion they will force their landlord to arbitration.[254] One might almost say that the customary tenants are trade unionists to a man. Again, who shall determine what the custom is? The court rolls will throw light on certain points, and occasionally we find lords appealing to them successfully in order to upset the tenants' claims. But on many matters there is no guide but tradition; the exponents of tradition are the ancient inhabitants; the lord has to ask them to expound it, as he does the tenants of Bushey. Can we doubt that this was a powerful check on autocratic action on his part? Lords come and go. But the custom of the manor endures, and probably loses nothing in the telling.