Copyholder [noun]

A copyholder without legal remedy may seem little better than a tenant in mere villenage, except in name.

For it is the destruction of the inheritance and against the nature of a copyholder for life.

In 1581 it interferes to protect a copyholder who has been kept out of his holding by the Dean and Chapter of Peterborough.

A tenant at a quit rent is, to all intents and purposes, a proprietor; a copyholder is not less so than a freeholder.

So after a while instead of "villein" he became a "copyholder."

The customary tenant is therefore between the freeholder and the copyholder, with a number of well defined privileges.

He drove a delivery wagon for a grocer, ushered at a theater, was even a copyholder in the proofroom of a newspaper.

The copyholder must not commit waste either by cutting 117 down timber, &c., or by neglecting to repair buildings.

The rise of the copyholder from a state of uncertainty to certainty of tenure appears to have been very gradual.

This copyholder was undoubtedly the descendant of the Welsh serf of mediæval times.