34 A FARMER'S YEAR 



eight years of time to bring them round; acres which, very 

 possibly, he cannot afford to face the loss of farming himself 



There is a great dea:l of talk about compensation by the land- 

 lord for the unexhausted improvements of tenants, but one never 

 hears anything about compensation to the landlord for their in- 

 exhaustible dis-improvements. Doubtless that unfortunate and 

 much-abused person has a theoretic remedy, but evidently it is one 

 which in practice cannot be enforced. Even with my present 

 experience I could undertake to leave the land I hire in a 

 scandalous condition without giving any of my various landlords 

 a cause of action against me which would be recognised as worthy 

 of damages by an ordinary jury. Obviously this sort of interpre- 

 tation of agreements is a new thing that came in with the bad 

 times. The old stamp of tenant would have starved before he 

 treated the land and its owner thus, or, if here and there one 

 found a man of a different kidney, the landlord would have given 

 him notice promptly, assured that his place could be filled by a 

 person of different views. But those days have gone, and other 

 days have come, when the majority of landlords are not in a position 

 to turn away a tenant, however bad he is, so long as he pays some- 

 thing resembling a rent. It is a case of V(b victis, at any rate in our 

 Eastern Counties, although fortunately there are still tenants who, 

 being men of probity, take a different view of their obligations. 



But however bad the state of the farm, the landlord who is 

 called upon to take it in hand will find that the valuation upon 

 it amounts to a very considerable sum of money. This 'valua- 

 tion,' it may be explained, is the amount due to the outgoing 

 tenant. If he is under ' Norfolk covenants ' he is paid by the 

 crops, if he is under the ' Suffolk covenants ' he is paid by the 

 ploughings. In the first case he will generally find that the farm 

 has been singularly productive during the preceding year, for with 

 skill and knowledge even a holding in the worst of order can be 

 made temporarily productive. Thus a boy with a bag of certain sorts 

 of artificial manure, such as nitrate of soda, and a teaspoon in any 

 ordinary season can go far towards securing a large total of bulky 

 root, however coarse and watery in fibre. One way and another 



