[65] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib I., c. 23.
[66] _History of King Henry VII._ (Lumley), pp. 70-72. He makes his meaning quite clear by saying "tenancies for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes."
[67] _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xvii. (Savine, "Bondmen under the Tudors").
[69] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum, loc. cit._
Nor is there much evidence that the freeholders suffered generally from the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century. It is true that there are some complaints from freeholders as to the loss of rights of pasture through the encroachments of large farmers upon the commonable area, some cases of litigation between them and enclosing landlords. But, since their payments were fixed, there was no way of getting rid of them except by buying them out, and though this method, which was so important a cause of the decline of the small freeholder in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was occasionally employed to round off a great estate, it seems to have played a comparatively unimportant part in our period. There is no sign of any large diminution in their numbers, such as would have been expected if the movement had affected them in the same way as it did the customary tenants.
Indeed, if the accounts of contemporary writers may be trusted, it would appear that their position was actually improved in the course of the century. Though even among quite small men one occasionally finds a tenant by knight[70] service, the vast majority of freeholders held in free socage, owing fealty and suit of court, and paying a money rent, sometimes combined with the old recognitions[71] of dependent tenure, such as a gillyflower, a red rose, a pound of pepper, or a pound of cummin. But while on some manors some outward form of feudalism, such as homage and fealty, were still maintained, the decay of feudal relations in the middle order of society had combined with economic causes to better their condition, and the time was already not far distant when those who held by the more honourable tenure of knight service would insist on its being assimilated to the humbler and less onerous tenure of the socager. The agricultural services of the socage tenants had long disappeared. There are many instances of work on the demesne being done in the sixteenth century by copyholders; but there is in our records only one manor where it was exacted from the freeholders, and other obligations were tending to go the way of the vanished predial labour. Suits of court might be owing, and set down as owing in the surveys, but one may doubt very much whether they were often enforced. Owing to the fall in the value of money the fixed rent of the socager often yielded only a small income to the lord of the manor, and in a good many cases these payments had disappeared altogether before the end of the century, or were so unimportant as to be hardly worth the trouble of collecting. Surveyors for this reason were often little interested in them, and, while recording the acreage held by the customary tenants and leaseholders with scrupulous accuracy, did not always trouble to set out in detail the holdings of a class which was financially so insignificant, with the result that sometimes the freeholders shook themselves loose from all payments and services altogether. Nor, had the surveyors been as careful as the heads of the profession would have had them be, would they always have been successful in dealing with this very independent class. They may protest that "next[72] under the king" the freeholders "may be said to be the lord's," but freehold lands have a way of getting mislaid[73] to the despair of manorial officials, as copyhold lands do to-day. When escheats occur, the holding cannot be found; when rents are overdue, distraint is impossible, because the bailiff does not know on whom to distrain. The suggestion that, as long as rents are paid and services discharged, the lord has any interest in the property of his freehold tenants, rouses instant resentment, and it would seem that by our period, at any rate in the south of England, the connection of the freeholders with the manor was a matter rather of form and sentiment than of substance. In fact freehold has almost assumed its modern shape.