Even when the demesne is leased it is not always leased to a single large farmer. In reality the surveys of the sixteenth century reveal two well-defined types of leasehold property subsisting on the lord's demesne, sometimes on neighbouring manors. The first type has as its distinctive feature that the lessees are a number, sometimes a very large number, of small farmers, who have been given allotments on the demesne and who hold them for various periods of years, sometimes for life only, sometimes for eighty, sometimes for ninety-two or ninety-nine, years. Many examples of this type of small leaseholder come from the west of England. Thus at Ablode,[377] in Somersetshire, before the demesne was leased out by St. Peter's to a large farmer in 1515, it had already been leased to seventeen of the customary tenants. At Paynton,[378] in 1568, the Barton land was held in small plots by fifty-one leaseholders, at South Brent[379] by eighteen. But examples of this arrangement are found all over England. At Higham Ferrers,[380] in Northamptonshire, the demesne has been divided among nine tenants; at Stondelf,[381] in Staffordshire, among thirty-one. At Shape[382] in Suffolk and Northendale[383] in Norfolk the demesnes are added to the holdings of the customary tenants. At Forncett,[384] in Norfolk, parts of the demesne are in the same way leased out in small parcels in the fifteenth century for gradually lengthening periods of years, though by the beginning of our period they seem to have been held by copy in the same way as the customary land. Elsewhere we get what appear to be variations of the same system, in the form of sub-letting or of joint-cultivation. At Castle Combe,[385] for example, the demesne lands were leased in 1454 to four tenants, "with the intention that they themselves should let to farm to all the tenants of the lord some portion of those lands." On other manors groups of tenants seem to make themselves jointly responsible for the rent required. It was not an unknown[386] thing even at quite an early date for a whole village to come forward and make a kind of collective bargain with the lord as to the terms upon which they would take over the demesne lands, and when the leasing of the demesne became the regular practice townships sometimes stepped into the shoes of the bailiffs, and averted the entry of the large farmer by leasing the lands themselves, and making their own arrangements as to the way in which they should be utilised. One may suspect, indeed, that such action took place in a good many cases when the land was leased to many small tenants, as at Paynton and South Brent, even though the intervention of the township is not expressly stated. Sometimes, however, the communal character of the bargain is quite beyond doubt. For example, at Cucklington,[387] on the manor of Stooke Trister in Somersetshire, twelve tenants leased together at a rent of £8 for forty years a sheep house with 250 acres of land. At