Curiosities of Rent. Such holdings were called " hornblow lands," and " wolf hunt land " was the term applied to some crown property at Mansfield Woodhouse, Notts, which was granted by Henry VI. to Sir Robert de Plumpton in return for his blowing a horn and chasing the wolves, then fairly plentiful, in Shirewood (now Sherwood) forest. The land so granted was one bovat or oxgang, which is about fifteen acres, that being taken as the amount which one ox can plough in a year, and the surname, " wolfhunter," was to be met with in the district up to the end of the last century. In some cases a property carried with it the duty of holding a certain office in the state, as, for instance, in the case of Scrivelsby in Lincolnshire, which was for genera tions the home of the Dymoke family, who for many years regularly provided the " cham pion of England " at coronation times. We will all agree with the eminent lawyer Coke, who says that the worst tenure of which he had ever heard was the obligation of acting as public executioner. There is an amusing note to the Ingoldsby Legends, in which the author states that Jehan de Ketche acted as provost marshal to the army of William the Conqueror, and received from that monarch a gift of land known by the name of the "Old Bailie," on regular payment of " ane hempen cravate," but, as a matter of fact, I may mention that the name Jack Ketch was applied to hangmen from the time of Richard Jaquett, to whom the manor of Tyburn once belonged. Lord Grey de Wilton's crest is a jerfalcon sejant upon a glove, which is a reminder of
407
the days when his ancestors held the lands of Acton, Buckingham, in exchange for keeping one of these birds for the king, while another reminiscence of ancient times is found in a clause which occurs in the leases of tenants on the estate of Wallingwells, Notts. This clause demands that no attempt shall be made to grow wood on the landlord's ground, and the injunction, which dates from hundreds of years back, is main tained to the present day, as is also the obli gation on the farmer's side to do so many days' work with cart and horses for his land lord as part payment of the rent. " So long as grass doth grow and water doth flow" is the poetical form taken by a lease of some land in Lancashire, and Adam de Oakes es caped with an equally light obligation when he undertook to pay a halfpenny a year for Pinley, Warwick, to Edward II. As the purchasing power of money was four times its present value in the Stuart times, we must allow for a still more ample expansion at the beginning of the fourteenth century, but in any case the payment was compara tively trifling. Though the march of progress has brought us countless unmixed benefits, we must some times feel a touch of regret that it has also swept away many picturesque customs which were formerly in vogue, and among these we must certainly include the quaint duties and ceremonies which constituted payment of rent, an obligation which in our day has been re duced to a prosaic, if more practical, matter of pounds, shillings and pence. — Chamber's Journal.
