Has chance or necessity ever opened to you the charter-chest of the respectable solicitor in some country town? Then, among his records, you have noted an interminable series of parchment volumes--very thick, very closely written, some centuries old, and one in current use. These are the court-rolls of the Manor of Wherenot. If you can spell out the beautifully written mediæval characters, you are sure to light on many a quaint record of by-gone folk and their ways, for, better than aught else, the manor and its muniments preserve for us the English past. Manors, they used to say, arose in this fashion. A great lord obtained a piece of land from the King; part he disposed of to tenants who held of him in freehold (this sub-infeudation was stopped by the statute _quia emptores_ in 1290); the rest was his domain, on part of which he built the manor house, another part was cultivated by villeins, then the cotters had dwellings with portions of land, and the residue was waste, where the folk of the manor pastured their cattle, gathered fuel, and made their ways. Sometimes these villeins were slaves, but each had his patch of soil, wherefor he rendered some servile office to his lord, ploughing his land, garnering his crops, or such like. The business of the manor was transacted in two courts, the Court Baron and the Customary Court. The first was attended by the freeholders, who themselves constituted the Court; the second by the villeins, who merely hearkened to and witnessed the doings of the lord or his steward. When a villein died, the fact that the new tenant had such and such a field on condition of rendering so many days' labour yearly was noted in the records or roll of the Customary Court, and this roll, or a copy of it, becoming his title, he was dubbed a copyholder. In theory he was a mere tenant at the will of the lord, but time fettered the lord's will, until the principle was evolved that it must be exercised according to the custom of the manor, for "custom" as Lord Coke put it, "is the life of the manor," and so it came about that the holder had fixity of tenure while he did his service. His position steadily improved, the slave became free, the servile toil a money payment, and now the court agenda merely register changes of title. This account of the manor may serve for description, but does not represent the real origin, which has not yet been exactly ascertained. It was a fragment of Old England, with a lord usually of Norman race as head, and the relations between head and members elaborated and controlled by the theories and devices of the mediæval lawyer. As manorial law was custom, old local usages were preserved unaltered; thus, whilst the root idea of feudalism was that the eldest son should inherit his father's land, and the manor itself did so descend, within it an extraordinary diversity of usage obtained. By a custom similar to that of Gavelkind (in Kent), the copyholder's estate was sometimes