194 The Period of Constitution Making
in determining the free status of him who sought remedy
in them. But the tenure still retained some servile
characteristics, as, for instance, in the form of alienation'
and when, a century or more later, it came to a question
of the lord's right to evict his copyhold tenant, the king's
courts usually upheld that right.I
The second change was the lord's parcelling out of his
demesne into leases at a money rent. Where this was
done, the lord ceased to be an immediate employer of
labour. The labour service of his villeins and all the petty
litigation and consequent fines connected with it—an im-
portant part of the manor court's work—ceased to be of
consequence to the lord. He was becoming pure land-
lord. "That fundamental relation between the lord and
the villein, that the former could force the latter to stay
on his land and work for him, was now a relation without
special interest or value."2
It should be constantly kept in mind in connection
with these two changes that the royal courts favoured
liberty, that is, they sought to draw to themselves as
much litigation as possible. When the question of villein
status was raised, the burden of proof rested upon the
lord, and it was usually a considerable burden; the kind
1 This was certainly a denial of the free character of the tenure as such,
But there were decisions in 1467 and 1481 ^to the effect that a copyholder
could bring an action against his lord if evicted contrary to the custom of
the manor. This was to recognise manorial custom as part of the com-
mon law enforcible in the king's court, and cut down the business of the
Court Customary. The occasion of the evictions, whose number has prob-
ably been greatly exaggerated, was the enclosing of large tracts of land for
sheep raising. This use of land was found increasingly profitable in the
late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. After this particular motive
for seizing copyhold land subsided, the nature of the tenure ceased to be a
burning question, arid copyhold served, in most essentials, as a free tenure.
The rapid decrease in the value of money resulting from the development
of Mexican and South American mines made the money payments of the
copyholder trifling and he finally became about as much an owner of land
as the freeholder. But he could not vote for the knights of the shire who
represented the county in Parliament; from 1430 to 1832 this right be-
longed only to the forty-shilling freeholders (see below, p. 390). During the
last century, this tenure has been rapidly disappearing.
* Cheyney in English Historical Review, rv,, 36. "A legal relation of
which neither party is reminded is apt to become obsolete; and that is
what practically happened to serfdom in England."