mesne tenant

Examples of mesne tenant in the following topics:

• Feudalism

  • The king was the absolute "owner" of land in the feudal system, and all nobles, knights, and other tenants, termed vassals, merely "held" land from the king, who was thus at the top of the feudal pyramid.
  • Below the king in the feudal pyramid was a tenant-in-chief (generally in the form of a baron or knight), who was a vassal of the king.
  • Holding from the tenant-in-chief was a mesne tenant—generally a knight or baron who was sometimes a tenant-in-chief in their capacity as holder of other fiefs.
  • Below the mesne tenant, further mesne tenants could hold from each other in series.

• Crises of the Republic

  • This system consisted of noble families of the senatorial rank (patricians), the knight or equestrian class, citizens (grouped into two or three classes of self-governing allies of Rome, landowners, and plebs or tenant freemen depending on the time period), non-citizens who lived outside of southwestern Italy, and at the bottom, slaves.
  • The government owned large tracts of farm land that it had gained through invasion or escheat and rented out to either large landowners whose slaves tilled the land, or small tenant farmers who occupied the property on the basis of a sub-lease.
  • Beginning in 133 BCE, Tiberius tried to redress the grievances of displaced small tenant farmers.

• Joseph II and Domestic Reform

  • The Hungarian estates claimed that their peasants were not serfs, but “tenants in fee simple, who were fully informed as to their rights and duties by precise contracts” and continued to restrict these “tenants.”

• The Isaurian Dynasty

  • Leo undertook a set of civil reforms including the abolition of the system of prepaying taxes which had weighed heavily upon the wealthier proprietors, the elevation of the serfs into a class of free tenants and the remodelling of family, maritime law and criminal law, notably substituting mutilation for the death penalty in many cases.

• Rise of the Ming Dynasty

  • Zhu was a born into a desperately poor peasant tenant farmer family in Zhongli Village in the Huai River plain, which is in present-day Fengyang, Anhui Province.

• The Economy Under the Ming Dynasty

  • The peasants often became either tenants or workers, or sought employment elsewhere.

• The Manor System

  • Additional sources of income for the lord included charges for use of his mill, bakery, or wine-press, or for the right to hunt or to let pigs feed in his woodland, as well as court revenues and single payments on each change of tenant.

• Culture Under the Song Dynasty

  • In rural areas, farming peasants either owned their own plots of land, paid rents as tenant farmers, or were serfs on large estates.