Ewell Copyholds Individual Plots

This information has been compiled by numerous volunteers from the Documentary Group of the Epsom and Ewell History and Archaeology Society (EEHAS). In its present version, it derives from indexes and transcripts of the manorial court rolls which are kept with other EEHAS papers at Bourne Hall. These indexes were made several years ago from the originals, which form part of the Northey papers (reference 2238) at Surrey History Centre. The court rolls cover a period from 1592 or a little earlier, and continue into the early twentieth century, but only deal with property that was held by copyhold tenure. All the entries for identifiable buildings are gathered here, but not those for fields and empty land. The plot numbers refer to the 1802 Enclosure Map of Ewell, reference 2585 at the Surrey History Centre; a copy of this map can be consulted at the Local History Centre.

In Tudor times, most people in rural England held their houses by copyhold tenure. This was a more formal version of the way things had been in the Middle Ages, when tenants were granted the use of land by the Lord of the Manor in return for services or, later on, for payments. On the death of the copyholder, the land was surrendered to the Lord, who would then admit a new tenant. Each manor had its own customs, or traditional rules about how things should be done, and these would expect the Lord to grant the tenement to the customary heir of the last tenant, usually the son.

Meetings of a manorial court (called the court baron) were held to register the surrender and admission of tenements. Each transaction would be written up twice by the steward of the manor - once in the court rolls, which were kept by the Lord, and once in the copy of court roll, which was kept by the tenant, and from which copyhold takes its name. It differed from freehold or leasehold tenure because the land was held by the tenants from the Lord, and was not meant to be granted, sold or mortgaged to third parties, although by the eighteenth century there were legal ways around this restriction. If tenants wanted to make a will leaving property to someone other than the customary heir, they could surrender the property to the Lord leaving it to be devised by will. Though they could not sell the property, they could lease it by consent of the Lord, and they could mortgage it by a conditional surrender, one that would only be enforced if the mortgage was not repaid.

Despite these practices, copyhold tenure placed many restrictions on the tenant. The property had to be kept in good repair, and failure to do this would lead to its forfeiture by the Lord. The annual rents, which had originally been the Lord's main source of income, were fixed and gradually lost their value through inflation; instead, profits were made from a customary charge made at the death of the tenant, called the heriot, which was originally taken from livestock but afterwards became a cash payment. A fine, much higher than the annual rents, would be taken from the new tenant.

Property remained copyhold unless it was enfranchised, which made it into a freehold; the Lord of the Manor would grant a long lease and then sell a release which renounced the right to reclaim the lease that had just been made. This was done solely at the discretion of the Lord until 1852, when the Copyhold Act entitled tenants to demand enfranchisement. Many villages, and some towns, continued with copyhold property but it was increasingly unpopular because it placed restraints on the property market. In 1922 the Law of Property Act proposed to convert all copyhold tenure into freehold, and this Act came into force in 1926.

Each surrender of a property, and each admission of a new tenant to it, should have been recorded in the court rolls, so that if a manor has kept its full set of court rolls, local historians should be able to follow the history of its copyhold properties from the earliest reference down to the year of enfranchisement. This is not so easy in practice, since one tenant could hold several properties, and each one may be described differently on its appearances in the court rolls. The tenement is usually defined by an abuttal, a list of the other properties or landmarks adjoining it. The tenement could consist of land only, or of land with a house, often called a messuage. The size of the tenement will be given either in acres or in perches: in this context the perch (also called a rood) is a unit of area, not of length, and there are four perches to an acre. The statute acre, as defined by law throughout England, is 4840 square yards, so the statute perch is 1210 square yards. But Surrey, like many counties, had a customary acre used to survey land locally.

The Northey family were Lords of the Manor of Ewell from 1755 until the Law of Property Act came into force in 1926. Later they presented the court rolls to the Surrey History Centre, along with other material catalogued as the Northey papers under the reference SHC 2238. The full reference for the first volume in the sequence of court rolls is 2238/10/170, but in the tables which follow, this is abbreviated to 10/170, and the same applies to other references, as they all belong to the same group heading. Reference is also made to the 1408 Register and Taylor's Survey. Both of these have been published, the first edited by Cecil Deedes as Register or Memorial of Ewell (1913), and the second by Philip Shearman as 'Ewell in 1577', Surrey Archaeological Collections 54 (1955).