44^ History of the English Landed Interest. 



Holdings Acts, each and all would most likely have repudiated 

 any such insinuations. Yet indirectly, no doubt, scientific dis- 

 coveries were effecting this end ; and when we read how Coke, 

 of Holkham, expended on his estate in fifty years nearly half 

 a million of money in permanent improvements, how on the 

 same area of land and in the same period of time his tenants 

 laid out another half million, and how in addition to all this 

 the building-repairs account in the estate ledger often showed 

 an annual expenditure of £10,000,^ we are not surprised to find 

 that both tenants-for-life and leaseholders required the assist- 

 ance of the legislature in adjusting their respective difficulties 

 over these insecure methods of disposing their fortunes. Of 

 more immediate importance was it however for both interests 

 to prevent any of the common fruits of their respective dis- 

 bursements from falling into the hands of outsiders, and this 

 was perceived to be the case under the custom of discharging 

 the tithe-debt in kind. 



Especially was it so over the enclosure system, as we shall 

 now see. By the Act of Edward VI.^ it was stipulated that 

 the owners of beasts or other tithable cattle " going, feeding, 

 or depasturing in any waste or common ground, whereof the 

 parish is not certainly known, shall pay their tithes for the 

 increase of the said cattle so going in the said waste or com- 

 mon, to the parson, vicar, proprietor, portionary owner, or 

 others, their farmers or deputies of the parish, hamlet, town or 

 other place, where the owner of the said cattle inhabiteth or 

 dwelleth." But that whenever the said wastes " shall be im- 

 proved and converted into arable ground or meadow the owners 

 shall pay tithe for the corn and hay growing upon the same, 

 anything in this Act to the contrary in any wise notwithstand- 

 ing." Again, though extra-parochial tithe had been adjudged 

 to be the property of the king, the extra-parochial wastes and 

 marsh lands, when improved and drained, were by 17 George 

 II. c. 37 to be assessed to all parochial rates in the parish next 

 adjoining. The number of parishes in which awards were 

 made under the Enclosure Acts of lands and corn rents in 



^ Caird's English Agriculture in 1850 and 1851, p. 165. 

 * 2 & 3 Ed. VI. c. 13. s. iii. and s. v- 



