Leasehold is a tenure by lease either for a stated term or for lives. It began to replace copyhold tenure from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. A conversion that took place over a long period of time.
The conditions applied to leases varied from manor to manor. Broadly speaking in the western parts of England the favoured method was a lease for three lives determinable upon 99 years.[1] The leasee paid an entry fine and an annual rent for as long as one of the entered names was still alive. Commonly the lives were for husband, wife and eldest son, though any names could be entered. Leases of this kind are useful for genealogy. Given high infant mortality the names of young children were not usually entered. Fresh lives could be entered upon payment of another fine. These fines were negotiable and during the seventeenth century Lords usually raised these to follow inflation.[2] This method of holding property was fairly insecure but it was relatively on balance with the method favoured in eastern England. Here, lease for a set number of years predominated, especially 21 years.[3] Sometimes incredibly long leases were granted such as 800 or even 999 years. On some estates leases of just a few years were granted.
Generally, two copies of a lease were made, the lease and counterpart lease. The lease was signed by the landlord and retained by the tenant. The counterpart was signed by the tenant and retained by the landlord.
Related to but distinct from an ordinary lease was the lease and release. A method of transferring land from one party to another without the necessity of enrolling a deed. The purchaser first took lease of the property for a year and on the next day the vendor conveyed the reversion of the lease. The transaction was recorded in two documents, the lease and the release. This method of property transfer remained popular into the middle of the nineteenth century. If you find a lease in a bundle of documents that is just for one year at a peppercorn rent, this is probably part of a lease and release, rather than a genuine lease.
Estate records often include decent runs of leases. Surveys of estates can give a good account of the various ways in which property were held.
Within archives, deeds are often found as bundles. Each bundle may range in date from decades to centuries related to a particular property. At each conveyance of a particular property, title deeds were handed over from vendor to purchaser. Thus, each time a property was conveyed, the bundle grew.
1763 – Lease and Release – John Wintle to Robert Smith which you have on your website please? Transcribed by Wendy Snarey, 2012. With thanks to Tewksbury History Society. https://tewkesburyhistory.org/1763-Wintle-to-Smith
References and Resources:
Information for this post was taken from the excellent David Hey (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (1996), 276.
Nat Alcock, Tracing History through Title Deeds, A Guide for Family and Local Historians (2017)
Introduction to deeds - The University of Nottingham, https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/deeds/introduction.aspx
A.A. Dibben, Title Deeds (1990)
[1] David Hey (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History (1996), 276.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
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