676 ON THE PROFITS OF AGRICULTURE 



sight, utterly valueless. There was a great depression in the 

 value of the most important article of farm produce wool, 



jf and a prodigious exaltation of all products of manual labour. 



. /But that which the landlord and capitalist could not culti- 

 vate except at a loss, or at so low a rate of profit as would 

 have utterly impoverished him, could in the hands of a body 

 of tenants, working with their own hands and for their own 

 benefit, be still a source of income to the lord, and become 

 hereafter a means for raising the peasantry to that comparative 

 opulence which they attained in the fifteenth century. We 

 have seen how this material improvement is traceable in the 

 attitude which these peasants took thirty years after the date 

 of this later Cuxham roll. 



The owners of one or two manors, the small gentry of the 

 time, must have been more severely tried than any other class. 

 They must have been constrained to descend in the social 

 scale, and to live like the tenant-farmers who sprung up about 

 them. The great lords possessed resources which, though 

 narrowed by recent events, were still sufficient for their state. 

 But they had to forego that profit which they had hitherto 

 derived from the bailiff system, and content themselves with 

 such rents as could be extracted from their tenant-farmers, 

 rents which at first, and probably for a long time afterwards, 

 were very little in excess of the fixed payments of the free- 

 holders of the manor. After Merton College abandoned farm- 

 ing on its own account at Cuxham, and had ceased from that 

 arrangement of a joint lease of land and stock, they let their 

 estate in this manor at an annual rent of from ten marks to 

 about eight pounds. This sum includes of course only the rent 

 of the land, paid by a farmer on lease. The rents of assize, 

 commutations for customary labour, and rent of the mill or 

 mills on the manor, were transmitted by another officer, called 

 the c collector reddituum.' 



In the same way the farm of Letherhead is let at an annual 

 rent of ^14 131. 4^.; that of Wolford at <i8 is. ii\d. The 

 rent of the former estate seems to be excessive, for it will be 



