What was “Copyhold”?

A number of our articles dealing with property matters up to and including the early 20th Century refer to “copyhold” – a form of land tenure that was abolished by the Law of Property Act 1925. (That left the continuing and familiar “freehold”, where the freeholder has full ownership of the land as set out in a Title Deed; and “leasehold”, where the tenant leases a property from the freeholder for some fixed period.)

Copyhold was a form of land tenure common in England from the Late Middle Ages, having been developed from earlier feudal practice. It was somewhat similar to leasehold, since the property concerned actually belonged to the lord of the relevant manor. It had developed from medieval ‘“customary tenure” (holding according to the custom of the manor) because changes of ownership were settled in the manor court and recorded on the manor court rolls – of which, more below. New owners received a copy of the entry on the roll to prove their tenancy – hence “copyhold”.

The way in which copyhold and its now arcane terminology* emerged from early feudal practice is masterfully summarised in the copy of Stephen Fortescue’s article at this link, being an abridgement of his 1947 lecture to the Leatherhead & District History Society and published in the Society’s “Proceedings” later that year.

[* For example “taking seisin by the rod”, as mentioned in our article about The Crown Inn. “Seisin” was the feudal tenant’s possession of land, and “by the rod” refers to the ceremony of marking a change of copyhold being registered in the manor court roll by the customary tenant’s clasping the end of the steward’s rod of office between the hands and swearing fealty to the Lord of the Manor.]

Manorial Court Rolls

The manorial records are usually described as “rolls”. That was their original form, and the name persisted when the records began being recorded in ledgers.

In Epsom, we are indebted to the late Dr Hans Lehmann for his careful work in compiling The Residential Copyholds of Epsom: From the Records of the Manor of Ebbisham, 1663-1925, the 400+ close-typed pages of which were published by the Council in 1987. In his introduction, Dr Lehmann noted that these manorial records, held at the Surrey Record Office . . .

“. . . cover the time from 1663 up to the acquisition of the Manor by the Epsom and Ewell Council in 1925. They consist in the main of two sets of court rolls, the first covering the years 1663 to 1784, the second from 1717 to 1925. The first set is written on vellum or parchment, the first eleven parts, from 14 October 1663 to 16 May 1725 in the form of rolls, the sheets or membranes stitched together on one end, and written on both sides of the sheets. From vol. 12 to 17, the pages are bound into folio volumes. The language of the early rolls is Latin with occasional quotations in English, changing to English on 30 March 1733. The second set is written on paper, bound into books.”

Author

Roger Morgan