INSECURITY OF LAND-TENURE 201 



tenants even carried out costly and permanent improvements. 

 Often, however, the uncertainty of this form of tenure checked 

 enterprise ; because of it, also, tenants fell into the routine of the 

 district and plodded along in the beaten track trodden by their 

 ancestors. Sometimes the uncertainty was a real insecurity. 

 Thus, in Yorkshire, in 1787, Marshall notices that confidence 

 between landlord and tenant had been destroyed by successive 

 rises in rents. " Good farming ceased, for fear the fields should 

 look green and the rent be raised." Local rhymes expressed the 

 popular belief that he " that havocs may sit," while the improving 

 tenant must either pay increased rent or " flit." Leases for lives 

 were common, especially in the south-western counties. They 

 gave a fixity of tenure ; but they were necessarily, both for tenant 

 and landlord, somewhat of a gambling speculation. Fourteen 

 years' purchase of the rental value was the usual price for a lease 

 of three lives. The initial outlay crippled the first tenant, and, 

 only if the lives proved good, was the purchase remunerative. On 

 the other hand, the landlord was often obliged, as the third Me 

 drew towards its close, to put himself in as sub-tenant to save his 

 land from exhaustion and his buildings from ruin. Leases for very 

 short terms were not infrequent. On open-field farms in Bedford- 

 shire and Huntingdon the term was three years, in Durham six 

 years, corresponding to the completion of one or two courses of the 

 ordinary three-shift routine. But in the last twenty years of the 

 eighteenth century, leases for 7, 14, and 21 years became more 

 common. Even longer terms were often granted, as the enthusi- 

 asm for improvement extended. Tenants under long leases throve 

 on rents fixed before the high prices during the Napoleonic war ; 

 but after 1813 the position was disastrously reversed. Prudent 

 men had taken their money out. The sufferers were new men, 

 who had enjoyed none of the advantages of the system ; they were 

 its victims, never its beneficiaries. Two of the difficulties by which 

 the tenure is embarrassed were already becoming important, if not 

 burning, questions the compensation for unexhausted improve- 

 ments, and the covenants imposed by landlords. Some of the 

 restrictions imposed by leases were a bar to progress. Leicester- 

 shire graziers, for example, were crippled by the absolute prohibi- 

 tion of arable farming ; they were forced either to sell off their 

 stock at Michaelmas when it was cheapest, or to buy winter-keep 

 from Hertfordshire. On the other hand, covenants of a reasonable 



