200 THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE 



farmers must die out before any complete change takes place." 

 To some extent the same arguments applied to small farmers 

 occupjdng their holdings in severalty. " Poverty and ignorance," 

 says Marshall, speaking of the Vale of Pickering in 1787, " are the 

 ordinary inhabitants of small farms ; even the smaller estates of 

 the yeomanry are notorious for bad management." It was on the 

 larger farms that he found the spirit of improvement and the best 

 practice. In Gloucestershire (1789) he looked to the " few men 

 of superior inteUigence " to raise the standard of the profession. 

 Nor did enclosures necessarily mean an improvement of methods. 

 In Derbyshire, at the time of Young's tour in 1770, many farmers 

 on new enclosures pursued the same course of cropping to which 

 they had been restricted by the " field constraint " of village farms. 

 Sometimes the landlord, and not the tenant, was the Vandal or the 

 Goth. Thus in Cambridgeshire farmers on freshly enclosed land 

 were bound by their leases to continue the old course of faUow, 

 corn, and beans. 



Even when a tenant-farmer possessed both enterprise and capital, 

 the method of land-tenure discouraged improvement. Without 

 some security for his outlay, no tenant could venture to spend 

 money on his land. At the same time he was often expected to 

 make improvements which now are considered the duty j)f^a^ land- 

 lord and parts of the necessary equipment of a farm. Yet the 

 commonest forms of tenure were lettings froni yesir to year, voidable 

 on either side, as they then were, at six months' notice. In the 

 eastern counties leases for terms of years, with covenants for 

 management, were in the last half of the century becoming a usual 

 form of letting. But elsewhere long leases were regarded with 

 justifiable suspicion by both parties. Tenants objected to them, 

 because they bound them to take land for a long period before they 

 knew what the land would do, and to make fixed annual payments 

 based on current prices which might not be maintained. Land- 

 lords also objected to them, because they deprived owners of the 

 advantages of a rise in prices, and " told the farmer when he might 

 begin systematically to exhaust the land." Where a good under- 

 standing existed between landlords and tenants, leases were not 

 indispensable. Land was often farmed on verbal agreements. 

 Ordinary tenancies-at-will secured Berkshire and Nottinghamshire 

 farmers in their holdings from generation to generation. Under the 

 same tenancy, on the Duke of Devonshire's estates in Derbyshire, 



