Page:William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (3rd ed, 1768, vol II).djvu/112

 100 tenants therefore, though their tenure be abolutely copyhold, yet have an interet equivalent to a freehold: for, though their ervices were of a bae and villenous original, yet the tenants were eteemed in all other repects to be highly privileged villeins; and epecially in this, that their ervices were fixed and determinate, and that they could not be compelled (like pure villeins) to relinquih thee tenements at the lord's will, or to hold them againt their own: "et ideo, ays Bracton, dicuntur liberi." Britton alo, from uch their freedom, calls them abolutely okemans, and their tenure okemanries; which he decribes to be "lands and tenements, which are not held by knight-ervice, nor by grand erjeanty, nor by petit, but by imple ervices, being as it were lands enfranchied by the king or his predeceors from their antient demene." And the ame name is alo given them in Fleta. Hence Fitzherbert oberves, that no lands are antient demene, but lands holden in ocage: that is, not in free and common ocage, but in this amphibious, ubordinate clas, of villein-ocage. And it is poible, that as this pecies of ocage tenure is plainly founded upon predial ervices, or ervices of the plough, it may have given caue to imagine that all ocage tenures aroe from the ame original; for want of ditinguihing, with Bracton, between free-ocage or ocage of frank-tenure, and villein-ocage or ocage of antient demene.

held by this tenure are therefore a pecies of copyhold, and as uch preerved and exempted from the operation of the tatute of Charles II. Yet they differ from common copyholds, principally in the privileges before-mentioned: as alo they differ from freeholders by one epecial mark and tincture of villenage, noted by Bracton and remaining to this day; viz. that they cannot be conveyed from man to man by the general common law conveyances of feoffment, and the ret; but mut pas by urrender to the lord or his teward, in the manner of common Rh