88 DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND 



of so frequently in the times of the first two Stewart kings. 

 They are frequent enough in the rentals and terriers of the 

 earlier period under the corporations whose estates I have 

 been able to consult, they disappear and the corporation 

 becomes the sole proprietor by wholesale towards the end of 

 the period. Now the corporations did not buy them, for their 

 income was rarely in excess of their necessary expenditure 

 even on very plain fare, to say nothing of the fact that the 

 purchase money would have appeared in the schedule of the 

 necessary or extraordinary expenses, and does not. The fact 

 that now-a-days such a legal confiscation could not be possible 

 counts for nothing in dealing with the interpretation of legal 

 rights two centuries ago, and the facts that the Committee to 

 whom the bill was referred when it came from the Lords were 

 instructed to take precautions against attorneys, and that they 

 were anxious to make the Act only temporary, are hints that 

 the measure contained something which is not on the surface. 

 It is to be observed that the Act does not, as was customary 

 at the time, render valid such ancient conveyances as had been 

 made informally before this date ; and I am disposed to believe 

 that at the time the measure was passed there was an intention 

 to deprive small freeholders at customary rents of their holdings. 

 Long after this time, unscrupulous landowners made use of legal 

 process, and were constantly successful in the attempt to deprive 

 freeholders of estates of which they had documentary evidence ; 

 they would be far less scrupulous at the time in which this 

 statute was enacted, and when in an Act of Parliament of 

 undoubted necessity and usefulness it was possible to insert 

 a clause which would satisfy a landowner's greed. 



Among Davenant's essays is one on the people of England l , 

 in which the author states that he had the advantage of obtain- 

 ing the calculations of Gregory King, the Lancaster Herald. 

 These bear on the population of England and its probable 

 increase. Thus King, having estimated as I believe on perfectly 

 good grounds the number of inhabitants in England and 



1 Whitworth's edition, vol. ii. 175. 



