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John Broad: Land, inheritance and housing under lifehold: Wylye, Wiltshire 1632-1925

Over the past few years, work, particularly by Richard Hoyle, has set out to revise our

understanding of land tenure in the early modern English countryside, building on the work

of R.H Tawney, and the more idiosyncratic approach of Eric Kerridge.1 Hoyle’s use of

Chancery disputes over copyhold in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to show the

boundaries of the three main forms of customary tenure (copyhold of inheritance, copyhold

for lives, and tenant right awaits publication in its fully refined form, but the case studies of

Slaidburn and Earls Colne that Hoyle undertook with Henry French, provide us with evidence

of the way in which copyholders of inheritance, and those with tenant right were able to

consolidate their rights to create a tenure that was so secure that copyhold land could be

bought and sold for a price not very different from freehold.2

There remains a gap in our understanding of how copyhold for lives worked, and the extent

to which it provided equivalent security of tenure, and flexibility of disposal. The main

outlines of the tenure are simple to understand. The copyhold was held in the names of

three people. The tenant had a right to go to the manor court to ask the Lord of the Manor

to change a life, and this usually happened when one of the named lives died. In return for

changing a name, the Lord of the Manor would demand a fine. While the annual rent on

the property was fixed and usually very small, the fine was variable, and from the early

seventeenth century actuarial tables existed that enabled the size of the payment to reflect

1 R.H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the sixteenth century (London 1912); E. Kerridge The Agrarian Problem in the sixteenth century and after (London 1969) 2 French, Henry, and Hoyle, R W ‘English individualism refuted -‐ and reasserted : the land market of Earls Colne (Essex), 1550-‐1750’ Economic Review 2nd series 56 (2003) pp.595-‐622 & French, Henry, and Hoyle, R W The character of English rural society : Earls Colne, 1550-‐1750 (Manchester 2007. French, Henry, and Hoyle, R W ‘The land market of a Pennine manor : Slaidburn, 1650-‐1780’ Continuity and Change 14, (1999) pp.349-‐83.

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the ages of the three named lives, and the current annual value of the land.3 Fines may

have been more arbitrary in the sixteenth century and for much of the seventeenth, when

the rules were not set, and landlords also sought to recompense themselves for the rising

prices and rents that applied to short leaseholds, and tenancies at will. Hoyle’s mapping of

copyhold disputes suggests that copyholds for lives predominated in an area from the

Hampshire/Wiltshire border up through Oxfordshire to Warwickshire, and in all areas to the

west. Some aspects of lifehold tenancies (which included both copyholds and leaseholds

for lives) were explored by Christopher Clay, but we lack a parish case study of how the

existence of lifehold tenancies affected the land market, the ability of tenants to sell and

sublet, the consolidation of farms, inheritance customs, and women’s landholding.4

This paper will begin to fill this gap. The village of Wylye in Wiltshire provides excellent

material for this. More particularly we are dealing with the manor of Wylye, which was an

autonomously administered part of the civil parish which also included Deptford, a much

smaller area with a separate settlement and independent field system. Wylye was a classic

downland village at the southern end of the Wylye valley. Today it lies close to the

intersection of the major roads from London to Exeter (A303) and from Bristol to Salisbury

(A36) and 94 miles from London. In the seventeenth century these routes had already

become important enough to provide trade for several inns in the village – the Green

Dragon was described as ‘newly built’ in a survey of 1632. The sheep-‐corn husbandry of

Salisbury plain was well established, accompanied by dairying and water meadows in the

valley bottom areas. Open fields adjoined the village, a large area of hill common pasture 3 Thomas Clay Briefe and Necessary Tables for the Valuation of Leases, Annuities etc, 1622; H Phillippes, The Purchasers Pattern, successive editions from 1654; S Primatt, The City and Country Purchaser and Builder, 1667.

4 C Clay ‘Lifeleasehold in the Western Counties of England 1650-‐1750’ Agricultural History Review 29 (1981) pp. 83-‐93.

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extended beyond, though by 1800 there were further arable fields beyond the pastures.

The open fields originally worked as two separate systems, to the east and west of the

village, but partial enclosure in 1796 saw the reorganisation of the arable into four fields

shared between all the farmers. Complete enclosure was agreed in 1841, and apparently

put into operation soon afterwards, although not formally completed until 1863.5

Wylye is reasonably typical of an agricultural parish in this area, but untypical in the rich

estate records that survive. Wylye formed part of the Pembroke estates which had been

accumulated by the Herbert family in the fifty years after the dissolution of the monasteries,

close to their seat at Wilton house, some seven miles away. The Pembroke estate records

are well known for their meticulous compilation, and surveys of 1564 and 1632 have been

printed.6 In addition there are good parish records and a significant number wills (through

beyond 1800) and probate inventories (to 1742) have survived. What makes Wylye suitable

for a detailed longitudinal study of landholding is the existence of linked surveys and maps

which provide a continuous record of land descent under lifehold from 1632 through to the

nineteenth century, and in a few cases on into the first quarter of the twentieth century.7

The continuity is provided by annotations to surveys of the manor made in 1632, 1705, and

1796, which record all the changes of lives on lifehold estates, together with the ages of

tenants at changeover after about 1700, and the fines paid for renewal. In addition the

1796 survey contemporary with the first enclosure is accompanied by a detailed surveyor’s

map of the manor which shows where the land and houses associated with alphanumeric

5 VCH Wiltshire XV 6 1564 Straton, C. R. (ed) Survey of the Lands of William, first Earl of Pembroke. . . (Roxburghe Club, Oxford 1909); 1632 E Kerridge (ed.), Surveys of the manors of Philip, first earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, 1631-‐2 Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society Records Branch, 9 (Devizes 1953). 7 The end point is the abolition of copyhold tenures in 1925, but the Herberts sold off most of the Wylye estate in 1918: VCH Wiltshire XV .

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codes for each property in the survey were located. By matching the changes to earlier

surveys to each new survey, the descent of each property can be traced for 200 years in

many cases, and almost 300 years in exception cases.8

An analysis of these changes is the main aim of this paper, but it is only one of the riches of

the source. My interest in the Pembroke papers and Wylye was originally sparked by a

further feature of the 1632 survey, the detailed description not just of the land and common

rights associated with each holding, but of the house and all barns and outhouses on the

farmstead. Each house was described in terms of the number of rooms, and whether they

were ‘lofted over’, and of detached kitchens, bakehouses, and brewhouses associated with

them, as well as the barns, stables, and housing for carts and farm implements. Many

houses standing today in the village are recognisable as retaining their cores as described in

1632, and can be clearly linked to the 1796 map, so the historian of building change and

domestic consumption has an opportunity to interpret the process of early modern re-‐

building. An additional resource is the survival of a detailed map of the parish of Bapton,

adjoining Wylye to the west, c.1742, in which the mapmaker also drew the whole of the

western side of Wylye village, and provided perspectives of all the houses there.9 The

morphology of Wylye can be delineated both physically and tenurially.

The bold outline of landownership change in Wylye is shown by comparing how the

Pembroke land was held at five dates as set out in the surveys of 1564, 1632, 1705, 1796,

and 1863. The first and last of these are free-‐standing, the middle three from 1632 to 1796

8 Wiltshire archives 2057 series form the core of material used in this paper. S5 is the 1632 survey, S27 that for 1705, and S106 that for 1796, together with the map 2057/P1/8. 9 I am grateful to Steve Hobbs of Wiltshire and Swindon Archives whose article in Local History News 95 (spring 2010) drew the map to my attention and provided an image.

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follow the same format and holdings can be linked. The pattern of holdings is shown in

table 1, which tabulates the types of holding at each date.

Table 1: Numbers of holdings at Wylye by type of tenure 1564-‐1863

1564 1632 1705 1796 1863 Freeholders 4 4 4 4 (4) Copyholds for lives 19 33 29 15 4 Leaseholds for lives

1 13 29 15 0

Leases for years 2 0 0 0 27 Tenancies at will 2 3 [in hand] 5 13 Total farm tenancies

28 50 65 39 48

Cottagers 0 6 9 16 ? Cottagers on waste/ encroachments

2 2 10 4

Allotments 5 TOTAL HOLDINGS 28 58 76 70 52

The most stable component was the manorial freeholders, who remained four in number.

One was the vicar with glebe land of twelve acres, but whose tithe rights were extremely

valuable, another a block of around 150 acres, while the remaining two were under five

acres. The remaining land in the manor, just over 1400 acres, was in the hands of tenants.

In 1564, the twenty one non-‐freehold properties in the Pembroke survey were held as

copyholds, with the exception of the Church house (held by the vicar) and the Clerk’s

cottage (held by one Henry Ley, perhaps the parish clerk) both at will. There is no

suggestion that any of these copyholds were other than farming estates, and copyhold for

three lives appears to have been the standard pattern. Six of the family names in the lives

had disappeared by the next survey in 1632, which also showed other patterns in how the

land was held.

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In 1632 the number of leasehold properties had increased by twelve as a result of leasing

out the manorial demesne in 1626. This was not let as a block, but divided and let as single

yardland holdings. Small farmhouses of one or two rooms ‘lofted over’ were built, and the

initial leases were issued to individuals for 99 years, with a rent of 53s. 6d a year, much

higher than the copyhold rents of less than 10s. a year. However, over the next 30 years

these were all converted into lifehold leases, with three named lives. These leases acquired

many of the characteristics of copyholds in the way in which they operated, with the

exception of the absence of manorial rights to retain the property during her widowhood.10

On three of the properties no house had been built by 1632, one of which was held by an

existing copyholder. Two further leases had particular characteristics: one was the

watermill, now described as a ‘grist and tucking mill’, the other was an inn ‘The Bull’.

The copyholds in 1632 were linked to holdings of ¾ to 2 yardlands, and although a number

of family names (e.g. Locke, Potticary) appear more than once, these were separate

branches of the family, and there is little evidence of significant engrossment. However,

nine properties were described as cottages. Four of these would be recognisable as

‘cottager’ properties of the medieval type, with land holdings of ¼ yardland in three cases,

and over ¾ yardland in the last. Of the remaining five, one ‘reputed a cottage’ was the Bell

Inn, another was a house on a 1½ acre plot carved out of a more substantial copyholding,

and the three others were houses built on the waste with no more than gardens attached.

One house on a yardland holding was noted as shared between two brothers (both ‘names’

in the copyhold) who divided it sharing a common entrance, but there may have been other

subdivided properties, or infilled cottages not described in the survey.

10 Cf. C Clay ‘Lifeleasehold’ pp. 93-‐94

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The tenurial pattern apparent in 1632 retained substantial continuity through to the mid-‐

eighteenth century. Only after 1750 did lifehold tenancies disappear they were not

renewed but the process was drawn out, and both copyholds and leaseholds for lives

continued to be granted and renewed up to 1850. The remainder of this paper will look at

three aspects of the workings of lifehold tenancies, and the land market over the whole

period. Firstly, it will look at the evidence for tenurial change over time as perceived from

the landlord’s point of view. Secondly it will examine how the families who held these

tenancies used their right to replace names to enhance individual and group interests, and

how far these properties became investment properties for outsiders. Finally it will look at

the relationship between the lifeholds and the farming economy of the parish.

I

The Pembrokes pursued a very conservative estate policy over the whole period. Demesne

leases to individuals in 1626 had been transformed into leaseholds for lives (99 years or

three lives) by mid-‐century. During the period 1650 to 1750 there was no shift in tenures.

Existing copyholds and life leaseholds were renewed, even when they fell into the landlord’s

hand through the death of all the lives without renewal, rather than sold, they were re-‐let

on the same terms. After 1750 there was some shift in landlord attitudes, but no systematic

attempt to changes tenancy patterns. These were now too well entrenched and, as will be

demonstrated, had little effect in restricting changes in farm size. The timing of changes is

shown in Table 2

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.

Table 2: Tenurial changes and cottage lettings in Wylye 1632-‐1925

25 year period

Copyhold to Leasehold for lives

Lifehold to lease for years / year to year

tenancies Cottages first let 1632-‐50 8 1651-‐75 0 1676-‐1700 3 1701-‐1725 6 1726-‐1750 4 1751-‐1775 3 1 1776-‐1800 2 5 1 1801-‐1825 6 5 1826-‐1850 3 1851-‐1875 3 1876-‐1900 5 1900-‐1918 5

Between 1751 and 1825 eleven copyhold tenancies were altered to leases for lives, the

majority of alterations taking place in the period 1801-‐25. These changes were not

necessarily linked to a sale to a new family. In 1765 Thomas Hayter surrendered his

copyhold at the death of his widowed mother despite the fact that his tenancy continued

because his name was already on the copyhold. Instead he took a 99 year lease on the lives

of himself (aged 36) and his two sons Thomas (8) and John (6). The family remained on the

property until 1797, and Thomas jr. was still a ‘name’ well into the nineteenth century,

interestingly designated as ‘of Mark Lane, London, gent.’ suggesting he had had a successful

career, perhaps in the grain trade. In the same year, 1765, a copyhold held by Mary Card

since 1724 was exchanged for a lease by her husband William Rumsey (including the

couple’s children Mary (9) and William (5)), despite the fact that William had been added to

the copyhold names in 1760.

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The extinction of lifehold tenure was a longer process and certainly not systematic:

copyholds and leases for lives were transmuted into leases for years and later to tenancies

at will from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but as table 2 demonstrates this

process staggered on for over one hundred years. Between 1795 and 1820 when lifeholds

ended they were replaced with leases for terms of eight to twenty years, but thereafter

year-‐to-‐year tenancies became the norm. So when one tenancy that had been in the Locke

family since 1578 came in hand in 1775 on the death of Elizabeth Young (née Locke),

Richard Locke was offered a twelve year lease. This was renewed in 1787 (9 years), 1796

(12 years) and 1808 (12 years) before being let from year-‐to-‐year after 1820.

After 1750 both copyholds and leases for three lives were allowed to peter out and not

extended, but before that date when either type of tenancy fell in hand it could be

continued on its old form of tenure. The history of a copyhold belonging to the

Pashen/Patient family illustrates this. The copyhold can be traced back as far as 1559, and

was transferred in the same manner before William Pashen acquired it on marrying

Elizabeth Belly in 1676, having already been granted a reversion in 1673. The family held it

until 1841 when Frances, widow of George Patient died allowing it to revert to the

Pembrokes as lords of the manor. The Pembroke estate then granted a new copyhold to

one of the leading farming families in the village, and John Perrior (aged 43) paid a fine of

£1641 for that right. The other two lives he inserted in the copyhold were not obviously

Perrior kin: John Andrew Ingram (26) of Ashton Gifford (gent.) and Christopher Fleetwood

(21) of Coombe Bassett were both Wiltshire men and may have been investors though

another Ingram held a large farm in Wylye at the time. Of the thirteen lifehold tenancies

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that ended between 1851 and 1918, six were leases for lives that had earlier been

converted from copyholds.

The cottage properties that were added to Wylye’s housing stock in the course of the

eighteenth century were nearly all let on leases for three lives. Few had more than ¼ acre

of land attached, many little or nothing: two were inns or alehouses in 1706, the White Lion

and the White Swan. The latter had been let on that basis in 1798 and was re-‐let in 1847,

although the two new lives were outsiders. In another case, a cottage was re-‐let in 1856 on

three lives and did not fall in until 1923. A number of cottages had come into the hands of

the parish authorities by 1796, and were leased from Lord Pembroke. These included three

properties described as almshouses, rented for 10s. a year, two further cottages (one on the

waste), and another belonging to Benjamin Dowdle let on a three-‐lives lease since 1774 but

‘tumbled down and taken to by the parish officers who pay Lord Pembroke an additional

Quit Rent of 1d. per annum.’ A coda to the terms on which the estate dealt with welfare

provision in the village was that in 1796 the estate let out five allotments directly for small

rents.

The evidence from the survey books clearly shows that the Pembrokes were not negligent

landlords, and looked to extract rents that reflected the market value of the property. The

documentation of the ages of all the lives at the point of renewal, or change of life, and the

terms on which the renewals took place suggest that the published tables available from the

mid-‐seventeenth century were systematically used to ensure that fines for renewals, or for

the purchase of reversions, reflected current best estimates of economic value. However,

they did this predominantly within the well-‐established tenurial pattern, making no

concerted effort to eliminate copyhold, and even when nudging tenants away it was often

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only to the slightly more efficient lifehold lease rather than leases for years or year-‐to-‐year

tenancies. As a result, remnants of the old tenures persisted into the twentieth century.

The last tenancy recorded as coming back into the Pembrokes’ hand is dated 1923, only two

years before copyhold was abolished by Act of Parliament.

II

The effects of this light-‐touch estate management on the way in which copyholder and life-‐

leaseholders viewed and manipulated their tenancies also pay examination. As with

copyholds of inheritance, and tenant right, the security of copyholds for lives appears to

have been accepted unreservedly. When the 1796 survey separated out rack rent from

lifehold tenancies, none of the rack rent properties was let as a farm with farmhouse and

outbuildings. They were either blocks of land joined to other farms, or five or so cottages

let for rack rent. All this land was let to farmers in the village who also held lifehold estates.

The strategies used by the lifehold tenants in Wylye reflected many of the features

described by Clay. The copyhold descent was frequently punctuated by long widowhoods,

but although there are frequent cases of re-‐marriage, no evidence of deliberate marriages

between old men and young women to extend the copyhold have yet come to light in the

way described by Bettey.11 Indeed in the face of the relaxed Pembroke attitude to the

tenurial status quo, there was no need to use marriage as a strategy to artificially prolong

tenancies. A number of examples of long widowhoods can be given. John Locke was

11 J H Bettey, 'Marriages of Convenience by Copyholders in Dorset During the Seventeenth Century', Proc Dorset Arch Soc,

XCVIII, 1976

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granted three lives on his copyhold in 1598, yet the grant of new lives in reversion in 1637

was still dependent on the death of his widow Joan Locke.

An extreme case of women’s lives dominating copyhold tenancies can be seen in the case of

a half-‐yardland holding held in 1632 by Joan Smith, then aged 80. She held it by the terms

of a copyhold grant made in 1559, when she would have been seven, and was still alive

when in 1637 a grant in reversion was made to William Belly and his daughter Elizabeth.

Elizabeth can have been no more than a year old at the time of the grant. In 1673 the name

of William Pashen was added to the copy, and in 1676 William is stated to be Elizabeth’s

wife. In 1694 William Pashen, her son, and his son William, were added, and in 1705 the

survey gives her age as 68, and the previous arrangement was confirmed: her son William

was 40, her grandson 14. She did not die until 1714. In this extraordinary case two

women’s names provided the continuity of tenure over 155 years, and although both were

married, and eventually widows, they held in their own names, not as widows.

The Smith/Pashen example may be extreme but it highlights the adding of very young

names to copyholds which was widespread throughout the period. Children below the age

of ten are frequently found in re-‐grants of copy, while the youngest children added were

Dionisia Cooke and her sister Temperance, aged 21 months and seven months respectively.

There were a number of calculations to weigh in adding young lives. Potentially, they

maximised the length of the grant, but this had to be balanced against the cost of adding

further lives if the child died before adulthood. Adding young lives was also a means of

directing the long term inheritance of the property. Adding the names of nephews and

nieces, or of grandchildren, was an effective way of controlling inheritance, and only in the

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nineteenth century are there cases when the descent of lifehold tenancies was specifically

stated to be by will.

The adding of a life was also commonly used to cement a marriage contract, and on several

occasions occurred one to three years before evidence of marriage, and only at the next

exchange of lives did the marriage become explicit. For example, in 1705 Susanna Card (60)

and her children (Christopher) and Elizabeth held a halfyardland copyhold, and Susanna held

it in her own right, not just as a widow. In 1711 Susanna and her son jointly paid to add the

name of Martha Whatley, daughter of a Salisbury maltster, to the copy. With the next

exchange of lives in 1719 (probably on the death of Susanna), it is apparent that Martha has

married Christopher, and to their names was added that of their daughter Mary.

Widow’s rights were not the only way in which copyhold for lives gave women power over

property, indeed it was probably the weakest form. When women were added as lives, this

could be because there were no male children, or just one, or it may even have been an

agreed strategy by the parents. Men also put their sisters into a copyhold quite frequently

when they had no male heirs. Furthermore there are a number of occasions when a widow

purchased the right to insert her own name into the copy, and thereby define the descent of

the property. Where women were names in their own right, and particular when they were

the lead name, or purchaser, some were able to preserve these rights over several

generations. Two flow charts (Figs. 1 and 2) show how two copyholds passed down the

female line of several generations in a complex manner.

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Figure 1 Female descent in the Potticary family

Fig.2 Female descent on the Cockerell copyhold

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There are other examples: Christopher and Martha Card (above p.13) had two daughters,

and when Martha died (before1724) they became the names with their father. When one

of them married a William Rumsey, when he was admitted to the lifehold, it was ‘in the

right of his wife’.

III

What was the effect of these various family strategies on the transmission of lifehold

property in Wylye between 1632 and 1850? Table 3 plots [see end] plots the transactions

for 31 properties with land and houses that were not merged and retained identity over the

whole period between the surveys of 1632, 1705, and 1795, providing the number and type

of transaction in each quarter century. Some arbitrary decisions in transaction typology

have been necessary. Exchange of lives [X] included a variety of different events such as

adding lives in reversion during a widowhood, and changing lives on marriage. Re-‐grants [R]

and sales [S] are particularly difficult to distinguish in a clear-‐cut way. If a woman who was a

widow, and the last life on a lifehold, made the decision to purchase three new lives for her

brother’s children, was this effectively a sale? When a new life was added to a holding with

a completely different family name, who took over the property twenty years later adding

his own family as names, did he make the purchase when his name first appeared, or when

the other lives expired and he replaced them? The point at which copyholds were

converted to leaseholds for lives is shown and every re-‐grant with new names is shown as

an ‘L’, and the end of lifehold [‘T’] is taken as the point where a lease for years, or year-‐to-‐

year tenancy is first recorded.

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Analysis of table 3 shows that lifeholds in Wylye were sold far more often in seventeenth

century, particularly during the period 1632-‐50 when political and social disruption was

intense, and in the last quarter of the century when agricultural prices were low. In the

eighteenth century there were relatively few sales. By interposing the list of tenant names

in 1632, 1705, and 1796 for each holding we can also see how long-‐term turnover of tenants

altered the social fabric of the village. In 1632 just seventeen families held the 31 lifeholds.

This was not a matter of engrossment by individuals, but because several branches of the

same family held lifeholds, and the system of replacing names meant that family strategies

extended across these clans to facilitate the long-‐term continuity of clan ownership. Five

Wylye clans show continuity across the whole period 1632-‐1796. The Barnes family and the

Furnell family had a relatively modest presence, and their longevity is all the more

impressive. The Barnes held two copyholds in 1632, three in 1705, and just one in 1796,

the Furnells two in 1632 and just one thereafter. There were three dominant lifehold family

groups: the Lockes, the Pashens (spelt Peirson, Pashen and Patient at different periods),

and the Potticary clans all throve throughout the period. At times the lives inserted in the

tenancies show addresses elsewhere in Wiltshire, and in Bristol, but there was a continuing

strong presence in Wylye as farmers. One other family group almost matched these three,

for the Frickers appeared in Wylye in 1647 as a name on the lifehold of the ‘Green Dragon’

inn, took over the mill in 1682, and proceeded to develop a wider network of lifeholds

extending to three by 1705 and retaining the same number in 1796.

Only one additional family was able to join this elite group of families during the eighteenth

century. The Perrier family first appeared amongst the copyholders in 1705 when they held

a cottage and half yardland, but in 1721 John Perrier, a carpenter, was able to buy a half

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yardland of copyhold which had no attached house. In 1741 his son, another John Perrier,

aged 29, was added to the two Hillman names on the copyhold of the Bell inn, to which he

added his son’s name in 1754, and in 1778 all three names became Perrier. The family

prospered and by 1796 held four lifeholds, around 100 acres in all.

The manorial surveys normally added the address of ‘names’ added to copyhold when they

did not reside in Wylye. These were relatively few, and mainly from branches of established

lifehold families in the village who had moved away. In marked contrast to the situation in

Earls Colne (Essex) analysed by French and Hoyle there was apparently little absentee

ownership of property in Wylye.12 Some names were from other Wiltshire community, but

they rarely endured. Only in the nineteenth century do names appear where there appears

to be little direct connection with existing village families.

There is certainly no evidence of London investment: not only was London 94 miles away,

but the links were to Wiltshire and Somerset towns and villages, and to Bristol and Bath.

There is also no record in the Pembroke survey of anything resembling a mortgage being

registered on a Wylye lifehold, as can be found in both Slaidburn13 and Earls Colne. This

bears further investigation, since it would seem unlikely that as a secure mortgage market

developed across England from the later seventeenth century it would exclude lifehold

property when copyholds of inheritance and tenant right properties could take advantage of

the facility, though Clay makes no reference to the practice. It may be that any such

12 French, Henry, and Hoyle, R W ‘English individualism refuted -‐ and reasserted : the land market of Earls Colne

(Essex), 1550-‐1750’ Economic Review 2nd series 56 (2003) pp.595-‐622 & French, Henry, and Hoyle, R W The character of English rural society : Earls Colne, 1550-‐1750 (Manchester 2007) especially chs. 6 & 7. 13 French, Henry, and Hoyle, R W ‘The land market of a Pennine manor : Slaidburn, 1650-‐1780’ Continuity and Change

14, (1999) p.369.

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transaction was outside the formal purview of the manorial courts, simply dealt with by

families manipulating the names on the lifehold to include their creditor. One possible

example of this is found on one of the Potticary copyholds, where for some decades around

1800 one Richard Poddy is named as the ‘purchaser’ without either marrying into the family

or taking over the lifehold for his own kin. In due course the Potticaries simply replaced his

name with one of their own.

Wylye, then, shows marked contrasts with Slaidburn, and even more with Earls Colne in the

way in which customary tenancies were perceived and used. Before the late eighteenth

century there is little sense of lifeholds becoming investment properties for absentees, and

even then there is no clear evidence to support such a notion. The existence of a small

group of village families who were much intermarried, and who seem to have seen the

family group as an important social nexus meant that while the number of families who held

lifehold tenancies with land fell, this did not result in the substantial engrossment of

property rights by individuals either inside or outside the village. When the Pembroke

family eventually rolled back lifehold over the long period of a hundred years after 1775

they became substantial landholders in a real sense, but for the bulk of the period under

observation they were relatively passive operators in a village dominated by families with

long connections with the parish.

IV

Analysing the mechanisms in the market for customary tenancies at Wylye is one thing, but

trying to understand how they related to farming units is quite another. Recent work on

farm size and agricultural tenancies has focussed on the potential distortions that may occur

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because manorial, estate, and taxation records generally omit mention of sub-‐tenancies.

Wylye’s lifeholds, with its many widows, and frequent use of female lives, beg questions

about who was actually farming the land. Fortunately we have parallel sources in the mid-‐

seventeenth century and in 1800 that help us understand the relationship between the

relatively equally sized lifeholds of between ¼ and 2 yardlands, the residence of their

owners, and the extent to which these constrained the expansion of farm size that is so

characteristic of the English agriculture in the period 1600-‐1850.14

The survival of the Wylye Hearth Tax returns for 1662 enables a check on whether the

lifeholders in the village were actually resident at the time.15 Juliet Gayton’s recent paper

on Hampshire copyholders and the Hearth Tax in an area of copyhold of inheritance showed

that a significant proportion of copyholders were non-‐resident.16 This does not appear to

be the case at Wylye. Twenty three out of thirty seven householders on the roll can be

identified as ‘names’ on lifeholds at that time, or as the widows of copyholders. A further

eight had either held lifeholds in the previous thirty years or were to take over lifeholds

(Stephen Kent in 1664, and Ambrose Fricker in 1682. Henry Lever who appears in the

Hearth Tax return, is not recorded in the survey books before 1690 when he was described

as a clothworker renting a cottage. He may have been renting, or could have been squatting

since 1662 in a house not added to the survey until the later date. Two names are

indecipherable, and only five householders bore names that were not familiar in the survey

books.

14 R. W. Allen Enclosure and the yeoman : the agricultural development of the south midlands, 1450-‐1850 (Oxford 1992); L. Shaw-‐Taylor 'Family farms and capitalist farms in mid-‐nineteenth century England', Agricultural History Review, 53, II (2005), pp. 158-‐191. 15 The National Archives E179/259/29 pt 3. 16 Juliet Gayton, paper to Tawney conference, Exeter University July 2011.

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The 1662 Hearth Tax confirms the essentially resident status of Wylye lifeholders, and the

family clans previously discussed. There were four Locke households, two Potticary, and

two Furnell, as well as a number of widows on lifehold estates that had been sold or in

reversion. This evidence suggests that most lifeholders were also farmers in Wylye, but

cannot clarify the size of farms, and extent of subletting. However this is possible at the end

of the eighteenth century by comparing the 1796 survey data of lifeholds with the Land Tax

for 1798 which shows both owners and tenants.17 The Land Tax assessments for Wylye are

particularly valuable because the lifehold estate holders were all represented as owners, not

tenant, and Lord Pembroke only appears as owning that part of the parish let at rack rent.

Here is further confirmation that lifeholds, like copyholds of inheritance, and tenant right

estates elsewhere in the country, were considered akin to freehold in terms of the tenant’s

right to dispose of them.

The 1798 Land Tax assessment for Wylye shows 31 owned properties, including four non-‐

Pembroke freehold estates. Property in the village does not appear unduly concentrated:

sixteen properties paid over £1 in tax. The two biggest payers were the vicar (much of his

quota representing his valuable tithe income) and George Patient (Pashen), with £13 and

£12 respectively out of a total of just over £71, while some fourteen lifehold owners were

assessed. However, when we look at the occupiers of the land, as set out in table 4 below,

the story is very different.

17 TNA IR 23/94. Inspection of the return shows that only Wylye village and not Deptford was included under Wylye. Unfortunately only two small properties in Wylye redeemed the Land Tax, so the additional information on farmers, tenants, and farms set out in the IR24 series is not available.

21

Table 4: Tenants at Wylye in the 1798 Land Tax and their share of the land

Five men were assessed for over 90 per cent of the tax burden, and it comes as no surprise

that they are all from the main lifehold families identified earlier: Edward Fricker, John

Locke, George Patient, John Perrier, and William Potticary, paid sums ranging between 9.6

per cent and 30.7 per cent. This reflected their peers’ assessment of the value of their

assets. If crudely translated into acreage equivalents, this represented farms ranging from

149 to 477 acres. All five had substantial lifehold estates in their own right, but each rented

additional land from Lord Pembroke or their fellow copyholders and leaseholders. The

smallest of these farms came nearest to representing that mythical yeoman farmer figure,

with 92 per cent of his farm composed of his lifehold land. At the other end of the scale,

Edward Fricker did not farm his copyhold at all, but leased it to George Patient, the largest

farmer.18 His ‘farm’ was ‘equivalent’ to 300 acres, but in conventional terms may have been

much smaller because he almost certainly farmed the tithe as well as the vicar’s glebe, and 18 Two Fricker copyholds in the names of Catherine and Sarah Fricker were also let to Patient.

Tenant Percentage

Acreage Equivalent

% Owner-‐Occupied

Note

Edward Fricker 19.3% 300.4 0.0% nb holds copyholds but lets out.

John Lock(e) 17.6% 274.1 36.6%

George Patient 30.7% 477.1 55.9%

John Perrior 14.1% 218.6 49.7%

William Potticary 9.6% 149.0 92.1%

Stephen Titt 4.5% 70.6 18.7%

All Six 95.9%

22

given the area of land allocated to the vicar on the 1796 map was not large the tithe

probably provided most of his income. 19 We can see from these figures that while

ownership of land appears reasonably widely distributed amongst village families in 1798,

economic power was concentrated amongst five or six of them.

The process of farm enlargement and concentration of economic power continued during

the nineteenth century. In 1863 a further survey of the Pembroke estates in Wylye was

made soon after the completion of enclosure. Quite a number of lifehold estates were still

in being, but the way the survey was set out shows a shift in approach: instead of listing the

various properties and their tenures, it simply provides a summary of lettings, and the

acreages involved, set out under tenurial headings – Rack Rent, Copyhold, Leasehold, and

Encroachments. Of the 1367 acres in the survey, 1200 were let to three men: John Waters

(399 acres), John Ingram (243 acres) and Christopher Ingram (554 acres). The first two held

all their land at rack rent, the last on leasehold. There were still four copyholders. One was

Christopher Ingrams but his single acre was a token link with the lifehold world of the

eighteenth century when his family had copyhold land for much of the time. Mary

Potticary’s two copyholds with just over forty acres were all that were left of that family’s

holding, while William Barnes still had 54 acres under leasehold for lives as the remnant of

an estate going back to the seventeenth century. Stephen Titt, who had farmed around 70

acres in 1798, may have been the father of the man of the same name who leased 30 acres

in 1863, while a William Titt still held 10 acres of copyhold land. By 1863 the old order had

largely been swept away, and the Pembroke had truly become landowners. Amongst the

Wylye cottagers with less than an acre were a William Perrier and an Edward Small who

19 If so, the acreage equivalence estimate is much to high from him, and the other farms must have been correspondingly larger.

23

bore the surnames of earlier copyholders, but of the Lockes and Patients who only 65 years

earlier had the largest farms, and whose families had such a large stake in the lifeholding

community in the previous 150 years, there remained no trace in the rental.

V

This paper has sought to analyse a lifehold village to compare its workings with recent

studies of communities under tenant right and copyhold of inheritance. Its conclusions

indicate that there are both similarities and some significant differences. The operation of

the 3-‐lives system undoubtedly provided security of tenure, but unlike copyhold of

inheritance and tenant right properties, at Wylye it never conferred a right to convert to

freehold status. The manorial lords did not press their tenants hard to alter their terms of

tenure, indeed made grants both of new copyholds and of leases for lives for substantial

agricultural tenancies in the 1840s. However, by gradually altering the terms on which the

land was held, either at a change of life, or when a lifehold came into hand, they, not the

copyholders ended up as the owners of practically the whole estate by the end of the

nineteenth century. Yet, the evidence of the 1798 Land Tax strongly suggests that the

copyholders of Wylye were able to create large capitalist farms even in the absence of a

strong steer from the manorial lord.

Other aspects of the workings of lifehold in Wylye also seem very different from patterns in

Earls Colne and Slaidburn. The ability to alter the names on the copyhold was a significant

factor influencing both inheritance, and the way in which land was bought and sold. It was

not unusual for two of the names to be very young children. This provided them with a

stake in the property, but one dependent on the deaths of two other lives. Many ‘lives’

24

never actually took possession. An exploration of how the demography of lifeholder

families meshes with the changes in lives awaits an attempt to reconstitute lifeholder

families from the parish register, as does an analysis of how these families used their wills.

Certainly there was a hierarchy within the lives, with the ‘purchases’ at a regrant (who could

be an individual or two of the three) gaining the right to determine future changes in

‘names’. Although Wylye’s copyholds were subject to some change and re-‐structuring over

time, there was not the same necessity to break them up to provide for younger sons that

existed at Earls Colne.20

With three names having rights in the lifehold, and a potential fourth, the widow, in the

case of copyholds, it was not easy to negotiate a simple sale of lifehold land at Wylye. The

usual means was to add the purchaser’s name, but only allow him/her to add his own

family’s names after the deaths of the other names. In this case, we do not know from the

survey books at what point the purchaser actually took possession and farmed the land, or

whether the benefits for the remaining lives of the sellers’ family were built into the

transaction. These problems certainly suggest that sales of copyholds for lives faced many

more potential difficulties than those of copyhold of inheritance, or tenant right estates.

But it also asks other questions about the nature of family (clan) solidarity that entrenched

important kinship linkages in copyhold transmission as it took place in Wylye. This in turn

begs the wider question of whether Wylye’s particular patterns were typical, or distorted by

the particularly soft-‐touch approach to tenurial change adopted by the Earls of Pembroke

and their stewards. If Wylye proves typical, then lifehold tenancy would suggest a need to

modify the view of English Individualism proposed by Alan Macfarlane by showing the

20 French and Hoyle, Earls Colne p. 241.

25

lifehold system to be one that provided mechanisms and incentives for family groups to

work together to preserve and extend their tenancies through to the late eighteenth

century and beyond.

john broad: land, inheritance and housing under lifehold ...€¦ · case study of how the...

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