Churchill Ancestry: http://www.geni.com/people/Sir-Winston-Churchill-MP/6000000003681560713

For those who want to see the article Mark mentions:

http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/ch...

"Churchill constructed for himself an impressive pedigree, but he was in fact the grandson of a Dorset copyholder. His father studied law at the Middle Temple, and became deputy registrar of Chancery, in which capacity he acted as jackal, and later Judas, to Bacon."

Sir Winston Churchill, MP

I take it he fooled Burke etc? He won't fool us! Let the corrections begin ...

Tagging Jason Scott Wills

Copyhold will, incidentally, be one of the instruments for the next generation of genealogists. For those not familiar with it, it was a form of leasing land for up to five inheritances. A glorious gamble. You could pay your money for the copyhold, plague could carry you and your four offspring off in a year, and everything would be gone. Or your son could live for a hundred years, hand the land down to a grandson, etc.

The point is that the freeholders had to keep records of the copyholders so they could get their land back eventually. Same thing with the tontine, another bizarre form of property (the Iron Bridge at Inronbridge, Shropshire, was a tontine). Everyone who contributed had an equal share. The last one of them who was living owned the whole thing. Again, the system had to track who had died, and when.

Mark

And what is a "jackal" - I take it not the animal. The "as Judas to Bacon" sounds metaphorical.

Are copy hold records becoming available?

I take it that he hunted down Bacon's enemies, and then betrayed him. But which Bacon? I was never interested in the blasted Tudors until Geni, but some of them seem quite interisting.

Impossible to know when some of the records for lesser-class people become available. For my family, the manorial court records are still suppposedly under cataloguing, and so not publicly avaiable, let alone online.

The Tudor era is interesting to me because its "the rising middle class" (not to mention close in time to my "1st immigrants"). I'm hopeful that City of London records become more available - I believe more can be gleaned an entertaining ancestors through them.