[103] Archbishop Sandys to Queen Elizabeth, Saturday 24 November to 4 December, 1582 (quoted by E. Arber, _The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers_, pp. 61-?64).
[104] Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), p. 120.
[105] Quoted by Nasse, _The Land Community of the Middle Ages_ (Ouvry's trans.). I have not been able to trace the reference.
The numerical predominance of the customary tenants and among those of the copyholders, together with the disastrous effects upon them which are ascribed by most of our authorities to the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century, makes a somewhat detailed examination of their position essential. In particular it is important to try to bridge the gap between the agricultural system of the sixteenth and that of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, out of which it emerged, and of which it continued to bear unmistakable traces. The problem is really a twofold one, partly legal and partly economic. First, what was the legal nature of copyhold tenure, and how did it arise out of mediæval villeinage? Secondly, there is the question, which for us is more important, of the type of agriculture which prevailed among the mass of the people. The economist wants to know whether the customary tenants were large cultivators or small, whether they included considerable capitalists and mere cottagers or whether their holdings were of a fairly uniform pattern, whether they farmed mainly for subsistence or for the market, whether they lived entirely by tillage or were pasture farmers as well, whether they were tied down by custom or showed any signs of being influenced by the agricultural innovations of our period.
Of these two questions the first has been investigated much more thoroughly than the second. We shall return to it later in considering how far the copyholder had security of tenure, and enjoyed legal protection against the lord who wished to evict him. But we may say at once that we accept in substance the argument of those who hold that most copyholders are the descendants of villeins holding villein land, that copyhold tenure is, in fact, villein tenure to which the courts from the end of the fourteenth century have gradually extended their protection, and that the puzzling differences between the position of one group of copyholders and another are due to differences in manorial custom which were followed and upheld by the courts. This not only is the traditional view, in the sense of being that which is implied in the insistence of contemporaries that copyhold originated in base tenure, and that copyholders were tenants "whom the favourable hand of time hath much enfranchised,"[106] but also seems to be that which best fits the situation of the copyholder as we find it in the sixteenth century.