The old lamented yeomanry of England were, the great majority of them, copyholders, and a copyholder was simply a tenant-at-will whose tenant right was consolidated by custom into a perpetual and hereditary property; and if the soil of England will ever again become distributed among as numerous a body of owners as held it in former ages, it will most likely occur through a similar process of consolidation of tenant right.
"Contemporary Socialism"
John Rae
"Custom 5. That if any copyholder or customary tenant of the said manor die, and leave his heir within the age of fourteen years, that then the nearest of kin and farthest from the land, have had, and ought to have the guardianship and custody of the body of such heir and his copyholds, held of that manor, so that at the next Court or Law-day he come in and challengeth the same, and to keep the same until the heir come to be of the age of fourteen years.
"John Keble's Parishes"
Charlotte M Yonge
It may be well understood, therefore, why these interlopers, who ignored the ancient customary law of the country, and who by means of an alien code deprived the poor freeholder or copyholder of his land, or justified new and unheard-of exactions on the part of his lord on the plea that the latter might do what he liked with his own, were regarded by the peasant and humble man as robbers whose depredations were, if anything, even more resented than those of their old and tried enemy-the plundering knight.
"German Culture Past and Present"
Ernest Belfort Bax