8 1 2 THE CONDITION OF 



date is shortly after the crowning act of Coke's public life, 

 after which he retired from a long and eminent career, the 

 composition of the Petition of Right. I presume that during 

 the active life of the Chief Justice, whom posterity has declined 

 to degrade from the office which the King took away from 

 him, Coke had been accumulating this estate, through which 

 his descendants have done more lasting services to English 

 agriculture than any other family in England. It is probable 

 then that Coke succeeded to valuations which had been made 

 previously. It is clear that he and his successors in title 

 considered that the maximum rent had been required from 

 the tenant. The rents indeed are not absolutely unchanged, 

 but the variation is rarely large. 



The average rent of the twenty-two estates which I have 

 taken in my list is a fraction (not quite a half-penny) under 6s. 

 an acre. One small estate is let at gs. *]\d. an acre, another 

 small one at 3^. id., and a very large one at 3^. 9^. Generally, 

 the larger the estate, the lower is the acre-rent on it, a fact 

 which seems to suggest that some of the rents were what we 

 call accommodation rents, and the Irish landlords always 

 quick to mislead styled, a few years ago, town-parks. 



If wages were only slightly raised, if wheat and rye were 

 fully doubled in money value, and if in addition domestic 

 industries were pretty generally diffused, as they were certainly 

 in Norfolk after the revival or development of the say industry, 

 it is not remarkable that land let at a shilling an acre thirty years 

 before should have been easily let at six times the amount 

 when Coke completed the first surviving survey and valuation 

 of his estate. In these three factors, cost of production, market 

 price of product, and the assistance given to the landlord by 

 the diffusion of bye-industries, lies, I am sure, the explanation 

 of the average rental of the Coke estate. The price of wheat 

 was doubled, the cost of labour was only slightly increased, 

 and even if no improvement were made in agriculture, the rent 

 can be explained by the price. 



Another rental of the seventeenth century which has come 



