of the manor or in the tenant, and the courts of
law have decided in favour of the former. In some instances copyhold for
lives alone is recognized, and in such cases the lord of the manor may
ultimately, when all the lives have dropped, get back the land into his
own hands.

The feudal obligations attaching to copyhold tenure have been found to
cause much inconvenience to the tenants, while they are of no great
value to the lord. One of the most vexatious of these is the _heriot_,
under which name the lord is entitled to seize the tenant's best beast
or other chattel in the event of the tenant's death. The custom dates
from the time when all the copyholder's property, including the
copyholder himself, belonged to the lord, and is supposed to have been
fixed by way of analogy to the custom which gave a military tenant's
habiliments to his lord in order to equip his successor. Instances have
occurred of articles of great value being seized as heriots for the
copyhold tenements of their owners. A race horse worth L2000 or L3000
was thus seized. The fine payable on the admission of a new tenant,
whether by alienation or succession, is to a certain extent arbitrary,
but the courts long ago laid down the rule that it must be reasonable,
and anything beyond two years' improved value of the lands they
disallowed.

The inconvenience caused by these feudal incidents of the tenure led to
a series of statutes, having for their object the conversion of copyhold
into freehold. The first Copyhold Act, that of 1841, was consolidated by
the Copyhold Act 1894. Owing to the incidents attaching to land "holden
by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor" in the shape
of fines and heriots, the inability to grant a lease for a term
exceeding a year, and to the peculiar rules as to descent, waste, dower,
curtesy, alienation, and other matters, varying often from manor to
manor and widely differing from the uniform law applicable to land in
general, enfranchisement, or the conversion of land held by copyhold
tenure into freehold, is often desired. This could and may still be
effected at common law, but only by agreement on the part of both the
lord and the tenant. Moreover, it was subject to other disadvantages.
The cost fell on the tenant, and the land when enfranchised was subject
to the encumbrances attaching to the manor, and so an investigation into
the lord's title was necessary. In 1841 an act was passed to provide a