DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 131 



the foundation of the college. Another sum has been unpaid 

 for twenty-two years. 



But the most curious item in the arrears is the deficiencies 

 in the accounts of the farmers and collectors. It will be seen 

 that these go through a long series of officials, who had suc- 

 cessively made default in several considerable sums. Two 

 Benbury's, father and son, had given up office under consider- 

 able liabilities, the son to no less than 36 $s. $\d. There is 

 a dispute about i 6s. 8d., which Richard Pynder declares on 

 oath that he paid the elder Benbury, and the collector probably 

 denied with equal ceremony that he had ever received. On 

 the whole, it is plain that corporations needed all the shrewd- 

 ness which they could muster, in order to be a match for their 

 agents and their farmers. 



The Takeley account raises an interesting question, which I 

 am not antiquarian lawyer enough to solve. Did a landowner in 

 these times possess any other means of recovering rent from an 

 ordinary tenant either in fee or for a term of years beyond that 

 of distress ? I should gather from the accounts that he had not, 

 and that if his tenant held, as he occasionally or even frequently 

 did, estates for different terms, and of different magnitudes, 

 he could not recover the rent due to him as issuing from 

 a particular plot, unless he could exactly identify the estate in 

 question, and distrain on it alone. This disability, if it be as I 

 conceive it was, will account for the precision with which 

 tenancies are described, and for the importance which Fitz- 

 herbert assigns to the work of the surveyor. 



In my former volumes, I stated it as my opinion that the 

 population of England in the Middle Ages could not have ex- 

 ceeded two millions, and that it was probably less. I am not, 

 and cannot be, in a position to demonstrate this inference, but 

 nothing which I have seen has induced me to modify the view 

 which I then adopted. The following table however may serve 

 to illustrate the facts at nearly the middle of the sixteenth 

 century. The Public Record Office contains a document among 

 the State Papers of Henry the Eighth, which gives the popula- 



K 3 



