THE TENANT-FARMER, 1583-1702. 809 



the experience gathered from the treatment of Church 

 property, the great institutions of education in England began, 

 cautiously and partially, to refuse renewals. They probably 

 dealt first with those who could not get the help of Parliament 

 in aid of legal plunder. At present, I believe, few of these 

 tenancies, which played in past time so great a part in the 

 agricultural history of England, survive. 



The rise in the rents of these corporations, partly due to the 

 increasing value of their corn-rents, partly to the fines, does not 

 get its full effect till a late period of the seventeenth century. 

 For example, the lease of the manor of Ruislip in Middlesex, re- 

 newed after a lapse of four years in 1607 at a fine of 66 i$s. 4*/., 

 was again renewed after a lapse of seven in 1664 at 320, the 

 rule being ii year's rack-rent after four, ij year's after seven 

 years of the original lease had passed. They must therefore have 

 valued the rent in 1607 at .52 13^. 4/. a year, and in 1664 

 at 213 6s. M. The fine for Monxton, Hants, in 1603, when 

 eleven years out of twenty had elapsed, was 20 ; in 1675, when 

 eleven years had again elapsed, it was 90. 



One factor in the inevitable increment of agricultural rent 

 in England during the seventeenth century, the rapid increase 

 in the price of corn, was present in the fixed or reserved rent 

 of the corporation estates, and was therefore, pro tanto, ex- 

 cluded from the rack-rent calculation. Now under the statute 

 of Elizabeth, the portion of old rent which this system acted 

 on was one-third of the amount. The fine then, in so far as 

 the reserved rent was a deduction from the rack-rent, was 

 only operative over two-thirds of the old rent. Now these 

 facts are exhibited in the income of any typical College. At 

 the beginning of my period, King's College, Cambridge, had 

 not adopted that alteration of the College Leases Act which 

 afterwards became habitual, though it soon did. Its money- 

 income in 1583 was 1308 17*. i\d. ; in 1584, 1308 i8j. ai</. ; 

 and the average for the decade is .1487 is. In the next 

 decade the average is 1989 u., the mean of the two being 

 ,1738 is. During the next fifty years, it had risen to 



