AGRICULTURE IN THE \6Tff AND 1 7 777 CENTURIES. 4! 



exceed the loss which the tenant would suffer from dis- 

 possession, though this in the case of an improving or enter- 

 prising tenant would be far more considerable than in that 

 of another who was, perhaps against his own interest in the 

 end, careful not to put himself into his landlord's power by 

 extraordinary outlay of a permanent or irreclaimable kind. 



In an earlier volume 1 , and again in another work 2 , I have 

 commented on the testimony given by writers of the six- 

 teenth century as to the practice of inflicting a penal rise 

 in rents, or an excessive fine on renewal, in citations from 

 Fitzherbert's treatise on Surveying and Latimer's Sermons. 

 But I think that during the latter part of the sixteenth 

 century, as well as in the earlier part of it, this enhance- 

 ment was limited by the tenant's fear of the loss of dis- 

 possession, and not by the competition of occupying appli- 

 cants. Of course this fear has been used as a powerful 

 and effectual engine for raising rents from the days of the 

 earliest witness to the practice down to recent experience, 

 and the fact that this very natural and just alarm has been 

 utilised for the landlord's purposes, is one of the principal 

 factors in the distressful condition to which agriculture in 

 England is now (1886) reduced. But there is not much 

 reason to believe that the competition of farmers against 

 each other for occupancies was an early cause why rents 

 were enhanced. On this subject we get fresh and further 

 information from Norden's work, entitled 'The Surveyors' 

 Dialogue V 



Norden, who dedicates his work to Robert Cecil, first Earl 

 of Salisbury of that family, seeks to meet and dispel the pre- 

 judices and suspicions which the husbandmen of the age felt 

 against the exercise of the surveyor's profession, and certainly 

 his first dialogue, between himself and a farmer, states the dislike 

 of the latter to surveyors with considerable plainness. They 

 are charged with prying into the farmer's affairs, with inciting 



1 IV 94. ix Centuries of Labour and Wage*/ p. 445. 



-t edition, 1607. 



