a term for various forms of feudal landholding in medieval England. The concept of freehold in English common law included the holdings possessed by knights on condition of military service, the rented lands held by peasants and urban dwellers, and the holdings of the church. In a narrower sense, a freehold was a free holding within a manor; it was juridically contrasted to the holding of a villein and, from the 15th century, to the copyhold.
The peasant freeholder characteristically enjoyed personal freedom and the right of defense in the royal courts. He paid a relatively low fixed rent and had the right to dispose freely of his holding through devisal, partition, or alienation. By the late 12th century, these conditions had enabled the most prosperous peasant freeholders to attain a status close to that of petty feudal landowners. At the same time, the process of class differentiation among the peasantry entailed the impoverishment of most small peasant freeholders, whose status was reduced to that of villeins, later known as copyholders. The freehold was the form of landholding that provided the most favorable conditions for the transformation of land into bourgeois property.