54 Large and Small Holdings 



stances of the time. Here and there allotments were formed 1 . But 

 they were only isolated experiments, or a result of the social ideals of 

 liberally-minded landlords. How little success the movement had on 

 the whole may be seen by an official estimate of 1868, according to 

 which, of the seven million acres enclosed since 1760, only 2000 had 

 passed to the labourers in the form of allotments 2 . 



The corn-laws, then, caused an artificial development of that unit 

 of holding which the economic conditions of the previous period had 

 favoured 8 . Accordingly nothing was more natural than that a radical 

 alteration of existing agricultural conditions and a consequent far- 

 reaching change in the customary size of holdings should be expected 

 from the abolition of the corn-laws in 1 846. 



1 Report on Agriculture, 1833, u> i249, 10,997 ff. ; also the Report on the Employment 

 of Women and Children, 1843, p. 15 ; and the Journal R. A. S., Vol. IX, p. 127. 



8 G. C. Brodrick, English Land and English Landlords, 1881, p. 234. 



8 Certain political motives may also have contributed in some cases to the establishment 

 of small holdings. When the great Anti-Corn Law agitation began about 1840, it was 

 recognised in the Free Trade camp that the agitation must be extended to the rural 

 constituencies. The old Chandos clause was dug up, according to which forty shilling 

 freeholders had a right to a vote. When in 1843 Lord Morpeth, M.P. for the West Riding, 

 failed to secure re-election, Cobden determined to put the ' ' forty-shilling freehold system " 

 into operation. The Free Traders, with the large sums at their disposal, were not long in 

 obtaining the 5000 votes which they required, and Lord Morpeth was duly re-elected. There 

 is no evidence as to the exact extent to which the activity of the Anti-Corn Law League was 

 carried in this direction. After the dissolution of the League its policy of creating freeholders 

 naturally came to an end also. But it was continued by James Taylor, who founded a 

 freehold land society at Birmingham in 1847. By 1853 there were five such societies in 

 Birmingham, which had bought nineteen estates and created 2300 allotments upon them. 

 Some weeks after Taylor's society was founded Cobden started the National Freehold Land 

 Society, also for electoral purposes. But it seems impossible that these associations should 

 have led to any serious development of small holdings, in view of their small number and 

 local nature. For a fuller account see Th. Beggs, Freehold Land Societies, \njournal of the 

 Royal Statistical Society, Vol. XVI (1853), pp. 338 ff. 



