AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



length would enable the tenant to make improve- 

 ments, it was hard to arrange matters so that the 

 tenants would not exhaust the land at the end of 

 the tenancy. It often happened that a tenant 

 would bring the land into good tilth and to a high 

 degree of fertility during the early years of his 

 tenancy, and then take as nearly everything out 

 of it as possible during the last few years of the 

 lease. 



Another objection to the granting of leases for 

 long terms became quite general between 1790 

 and 1815. The landlords objected that as a 

 result of rising prices during the period covered 

 by the leases, they sustained great losses. It was 

 maintained by the landlords of Surrey, for exam- 

 ple, that by letting land for a term of fourteen or 

 twenty-one years or any longer period, the owners 

 of the land actually received, "almost every year 

 during the currency of the lease, and certainly in 

 the latter years of it, a less rent than he did at 

 the commencement, from the depreciation in the 

 value of money." 1 And for this reason the land- 

 lords were objecting to the granting of leases. 

 Even in the county of Norfolk, where the twenty- 

 one year lease had proved so beneficial, the land- 

 lords objected to long leases because it so often 

 happened that soon after a farm was rented the 

 prices of agricultural produce would rise so much 

 higher than when the lease was taken, that the 



1 W. Stevenson, Agriculture of Surrey, p. 98. 

 300 



