Later Agrarian Legislation. 451 



In this respect the presence of the lay impropriator was a 

 distinct advantage to the Church, accentuating as it did the 

 purely commercial side of the transaction. But the farmer 

 often 'suffered grievous oppression at the hands of lay-rectors ; 

 and in the Agricultural Report from the County of North- 

 amptonshire we read of an instance where the tithes having 

 been let for the purpose of oppression, the collector not only 

 pounced upon the tenth shock of corn, and tenth cole of hay, 

 but also the tenth lamb, pig, hen, ^g'g^ etc., and even went 

 into the garden and appropriated a share of its flowers, fruit 

 and vegetables. 



Defoe tells us,^ in his Tour throuqh Britain about the middle 

 of the eighteenth century, that, owing to the frequent disputes 

 over the tithe, the farmers gave up the cultivation of madder 

 in disgust, and thus left to the Dutch a lucrative source of 

 profit in the home markets.^ 



The owners of land suffered principally in two ways. It 

 was often found impossible for a tenant with his meagre means 

 to improve barren soils, and his landlord therefore set to work 

 to reckon, if by laying out a certain proportion of his capital 

 in its cultivation, he might reasonably expect a proper interest 

 on this expenditure. In many cases the tithe item was found 

 likely to swallow up all the profits of the extra rent, so that 

 this portion of the estate continued to remain unremunerative. 

 So careful were proprietors to avoid any drain on the fertility 

 of their lands when let out to farming tenants, that they 

 restricted the outgoings by stringent clauses in their leases. 

 But what was the use of this when every year a tenth of the 

 produce disappeared absolutely into the tithe-owner's pockets ? 

 " What punishment," asks a writer of the times, " would the 

 proprietors of these lands deem adequate to the crinle of selling 

 off the whole produce of the farm every tenth year? Yet 

 great as the crime would be, it would not be adequate in point 

 of damage to the right of drawing tithe in kind from their 

 arable lands, because the farmer who sold the produce would, 

 at least, become possessed of money to replace, in some degree, 



1 Tour through Britain, vol. i. p. 59, 17G9. 



" The tithe of madder was by 31 Geo. II. c. 12 charged at hs. per acre. 



