<<I have recently received a will from the late 1700's that lists a copyhold cottage as well as some freehold land and I just wondered if anybody could please explain to me what copyhold means? Thankyou very much. Kind regards, Tina Connell>> Hello Tina, at the present day there are two ways of owning landed property - 1. freehold and 2. through a lease or tenancy. But until 1925 there was a third way - copyhold. Before I say something about copyhold, it is necessary first to explain something else. Nowadays we think of a tenancy as just a shorter and less formal type of lease, but technically all forms of ownership are tenancies, and every owner of property has a landlord, even freeholders (their landlord is the Queen, as she is the feudal lord of the whole country). Nowadays that freehold lordship is purely technical, and for all practical purposes a freeholder is the absolute owner of his land, beholden to nobody, but in the medieval past things were very different. Then every freeholder had a lord, and had to pay him a rent or even work on his land - the difference between freeholders and the rest was just that freeholders paid smaller rents and had to do much less work (and were personally free - they weren't serfs). Most of the rest of the rural population were serfs. They held their land on a kind of tenancy that was halfway between a freehold tenancy and what we nowadays call leasehold or tenancy. In the middle ages their kind of tenancy was called a customary tenancy (also called a native or villein or bond tenancy), but around 1500 it began to be called copyhold (because ownership was recorded in the lord's manor court roll and the tenant was given a copy of the entry on the roll as his title deed). There were different kinds of copyhold, but in many parts of England (broadly the eastern half, including Bucks) the most prevalent sort was a type called 'copyhold of inheritance' which was not greatly different from a freehold - you just had to pay a lot more to the lord. However the rents were often fixed (ie the lord couldn't increase them - ever), so that what had been a very heavy burden in the middle ages became much easier to pay after the inflation of the Tudor period. However copyholders had to make a number of other payments which lords could use to effect a kind of rent increase. Every time the owner died or sold the property he make a payment called heriot (it was usually the 'best beast', the most valuable animal on the holding - their value increased with inflation), and the heir or purchaser had to make another payment called a fine. In may areas this last payment could be any amount the lord chose to demand, so they could use this to effect a kind of rent! increase to compensate for the falling value of the real rents. But in some areas even the amount of the fines was fixed by custom, and here the copyholds were almost as valuable as freeholds. (In other areas, notably the western half of the country, 'copyhold for lives' was more common. Here properties were held for the lives of a number of named persons - frequently the tenant, his wife and their son. Once the third named person had died the property reverted back to the lord, who could charge whatever he liked to allow that person's heir to inherit, or sell it someone else.) In the 16th and 17th centuries most of the land in any given manor would have been copyhold, but it mostly disappeared in the 18th and early 19th centuries, as lords bought it back from their tenants (or, in the west, just took it back) and re-let it to tenant farmers on modern leases and tenancies. In 1925 all copyholds were converted into freeholds. Matt Tompkins Blaston, Leics