Definition
A tenant by copy of court roll — commonly shortened to "tenant by copy" — is the historical name for a copyholder: a person who held land at the will of the lord of a manor, the evidence of whose title was a copy of an entry made in the rolls of the manorial court. The term describes the defining feature of copyhold tenure — that the tenant's title rested not on a formal deed or royal grant, but on a transcript of the court roll recording the lord's admission of the tenant to the land.
The phrase is essentially a label for the method of proof of title that distinguished copyholders from freeholders and leaseholders. Where a freeholder could produce a deed or charter, the copyholder's only documentary evidence of right was this copy of the manorial court's record. Possession without that copy was possession without legal standing.
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Common Confusion
TENANT BY COPY OF COURT ROLL is frequently treated as interchangeable with COPYHOLDER, and for practical purposes it is. The distinction, if any, is one of emphasis: "copyholder" describes the tenurial status; "tenant by copy of court roll" describes the evidentiary basis of that status. Historical sources use both forms, but "copyholder" became dominant in later legal writing, and "tenant by copy" largely disappeared from active legal usage after copyhold tenure was abolished in England by the Law of Property Act 1922. Researchers should not read substantive legal difference into a source's choice between the two terms.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a marker of historical materials. Any source using "tenant by copy of court roll" as an operative legal phrase is drawing on English feudal land law, most likely pre-twentieth century. Researchers encountering the phrase should immediately pivot to COPYHOLD as the principal research entry, since the historical dictionary literature treats the two terms as synonymous and the substantive law is filed under copyhold.
The evidentiary logic embedded in the term matters for understanding manorial records. Because the tenant's title derived from the court roll entry, manorial court rolls are primary sources for establishing historical title to former copyhold land. Researchers working with English land records from the medieval period through the nineteenth century may find that questions of ownership, inheritance, and transfer of specific parcels turn entirely on what the court rolls record — and the absence of a court roll entry could defeat a claim entirely.
One research trap: do not assume that "tenant by copy" in an older American source refers to a recognized American tenure. Copyhold was never transplanted to the American colonies in its English form. When Rapalje & Lawrence and similar American law dictionaries define this term, they are reporting English law for comparative and historical reference. Finding the phrase in an American legal document would be unusual and likely indicates either a scholarly treatise, a direct quotation from an English authority, or an anomalous local circumstance requiring close investigation.
The abbreviation "tenant by copy" (without the full phrase) appears in some historical sources and, in context, always means the same thing. Littleton's Tenures, section 73 (cited in Rapalje & Lawrence), is the foundational text for this usage — researchers tracing the earliest authority will find the term rooted there.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is characteristically terse: the term is glossed simply as "the old-fashioned name for a copyholder," with a citation to Littleton's Tenures section 73 and a cross-reference to COPYHOLDS. This compression is accurate. By the time American legal dictionaries were being compiled in the late nineteenth century, the full phrase had receded into antiquarian usage, and the shorter "copyholder" had displaced it in ordinary legal writing.
Littleton's use of the full phrase in the fifteenth century reflects a period when the evidentiary peculiarity of the tenure — title by court roll copy rather than deed — was genuinely distinctive and required naming. As copyhold became a well-understood category over the following centuries, writers increasingly used "copyholder" as a self-contained term and let the evidential mechanism recede into background assumption.
Historical dictionaries uniformly treat this as a term requiring no independent analysis beyond the copyhold cross-reference. Researchers should not expect any source to develop substantive doctrine under this heading; the doctrine lives under COPYHOLD.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is English in origin and operative only in the context of English manorial tenure. It has no direct American legal equivalent. Scotland, Ireland, and other common law jurisdictions developed their own forms of subordinate land tenure that do not map precisely onto copyhold.
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