SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY it might be physically cut up into as many as 24 scattered bits, was legally one, and had usually one holder. The natural tendency to subdivision of holdings with an increase of population, which would have found a wider expression in case of free tenure, had led to two of the holdings being repre- sented by groups of partners, and apparently to the actual subdivision of a third. During the reign of Henry III this situation underwent an entire revolution. Each of the former holdings is now represented by a number of tenants, several by three or four, others by eight, ten, or a dozen, one by a score. The successors of the original holders have generally retained one or two acres of each holding, and assumed the right of letting out the rest. Many of the new tenants hold only a cottage, a rod of land, or one or two half-acres. The population of Gorleston as a prosperous fishing village has obviously increased, much more than doubled, and at first sight it looks as if small holdings had become universal. On closer examination of the list, however, a new and still more inter- esting fact emerges. The strips thus sub-let in any one holding are taken generally each by a separate tenant, but a number of these tenants have also taken strips in other holdings. Sometimes half a dozen of these new tenancies are under the same name, and the name is generally that of a descendant of one of the original holders of 1 2 acres. A single instance will serve to illustrate the process that has been going on. A certain John Bond was one of the villeins holding 12 acres in the time of Henry III. His son has let 2 acres to Matilda Bond, i acre to Thomas le Palmer and Alicia his wife, and 2l acres to Margaret, widow of Roger Ruffi. He has let small plots of land for building purposes to eight persons, who now hold five messuages and four cottages upon them. In John Bond's own occupation there can hardly be left more than five or six of his original i 2 acres. But while he has been letting to others he has been entering upon new tenancies himself. He has three half-acre strips from the holdings of three different neighbours, 3 rods from a fourth, i acre from a fifth, two lots of i J acres each from a sixth and a seventh, and another piece of unspecified size from an eighth, of the original holdings.^ The amount of land in his occupation is therefore almost exactly the same as at first. But why should he have abandoned his compact ancestral holding to replace it by this multifarious tenancy of frag- ments } There seems but one answer possible. The compactness of the ancestral holding was on paper only ; the land itself was scattered about the village in probably as many as twenty-four pieces. He has abandoned half of these in order that he might build up a more compact estate round the other half by adding to them the strips of his neighbours that lay on either side of his own in the open fields. And several of his neighbours have been doing the same. So that in place of a few holdings of uniform size held on servile conditions and cultivated on uneconomical principles, we have a great increase of small holdings, the growth of compact holdings affording more scope for enterprise and capital, and in both cases the servile conditions have all but disappeared. Yet so great is the power of custom that more than three centuries later the framework of the original system is still clearly discernible behind all the changes of tenure and subdivisions of property. In the reign of Elizabeth " Hund. R. (Rec. Com.), ii, 167-8. 643
