These sub-tenants were the great men in the several parishes,
and became the actual lords of the manors, residing upon the manors,
and having each, on their several manors, very large powers for good
or evil over the, tillers of the soil.
A manor six hundred years ago meant something very different from a
manor now. The lord was a petty king, having his subjects very much
under his thumb. But his subjects differed greatly in rank and
status. In the first place, there were those who were called the free
tenants. The free tenants were they who lived in houses of their own
and cultivated land of their own, and who made only an annual money
payment to the lord of the manor as an acknowledgment of his
lordship. The payment was trifling, amounting to some few pence an
acre at the most, and a shilling or so, as the case might be, for the
house. This was called the _rent_, but it is a very great
mistake indeed to represent this as the same thing which we mean by
rent now-a-days. It really was almost identical with what we now call
in the case of house property, "ground rent," and bore no proportion
to the value of the produce that might be raised from the soil which
the tenant held. The free tenant was neither a yearly tenant, nor a
leaseholder. His holding was, to all intents and purposes, his own--
subject, of course, to the payment of the ground rent.
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