302 Histoiy of the English Landed Interest. 



Elizabethan estate management. There -were two distinct 

 species of the genus land -agent in those days, and it is some- 

 times hard to distinguish the one from the other. Besides the 

 individual already described in an earlier chapter, there was 

 the steward, who often performed the more important house- 

 hold duties of a modern butler, besides the buying, selling, 

 measuring, valuing, and appraising of his master's lands and 

 livestock. Just as the first-named species was neither wholly 

 a lawj^er, a banker, a surveyor, or a steward, but a mixture of 

 all these professions, so also the latter was neither an estate 

 agent, a butler, nor a bailiff, but a compound of the three. It 

 would seem to have been vastly more essential then than now 

 that both varieties of agent should have been well versed in 

 legal lore ; for, together with the new trading blood, a litigious 

 element had entered into the character of the possessors of the 

 soil. Up to this period we have traced the sub-tenant's gradual 

 climb into fixity of tenure. In 1-11:9 he, as leaseholder, had 

 secured a further and securer foothold bj^ means of the legis- 

 lation which allowed his lease to override a purchaser's deed. 

 Again in 1469 he rose a step when the law protected his pro- 

 perty from the clutches of his landlord's debtors ; and his 

 cherished copy of the court roll, even if it had not formally 

 received the recognition of the statute book, had at any rate 

 long entitled him to trespass claims against his lord for dispos- 

 session. But the commercial instincts which had been brought 

 to bear upon the land by the recent change of owners, now 

 stimulated the ci-devant traders to win back by fair though 

 sharp practice all that had been ceded during the past cen- 

 turies. There were no traditions to check the fresh lord's 

 proceedings ; and tradition was the very pith of the complex 

 system of land tenure in existence. Services rendered in the 

 remote past by one side or the other had established hereditary' 

 claims which found indelible expression in the manorial cus- 

 toms of the court roll. AVhy should the new master carrj" 

 out a system of land tenure that shocked his business-like in- 

 stincts of justice ? What had he to do with pepper-corn rents 

 and widows' claims for free bench ? There were all the con- 

 fusing results of a land tenure based on feudalism, without any 



