304 History of the English Landed Intci'cst. 



It was for these reasons that both supervisor and steward 

 were ill qualified for their respective offices if the}'- had not 

 acquired a legal training. A student at Gray's Inn, possessed 

 of an hereditary connection with some estate, stood a good 

 chance of preferment to its vacant stewardship. The appoint- 

 ment does not seem to have been highly lucrative, for the 

 salary was a few shillings a year augmented by a few acres of 

 low-rented land and the fees from all the courts leet, courts 

 baron and manor courts on which a steward had to sit. It is 

 conceivable that this office, which even in modern times brings 

 its holder a good deal of popular opprobrium, must have been 

 in the uneducated Tudor days almost untenable by reason of 

 unfounded charges, such as fraud, favouritism, extortion, and 

 the like. As his only refuge therefore from such hostility, the 

 steward seldom thought it his duty to see more than his em- 

 ployer's side of every question — an unwholesome condition of 

 mind in one whose business relationship involved both parties 

 to every transaction, and who was alone in a position to re- 

 present matters to his master in their true light.^ 



But if the fresh commercial blood had let in upon the land a 

 flood of litigation, it had also introduced a flood of fresh know- 

 ledge. The English soil had been brought into touch with 

 foreign agricultural improvements by means of its trade connec- 

 tion. It was not only through the importation of the potato, 

 clover, and other useful plants, that agriculture came to the 

 front during this century. Merchant adventurers brought 

 back from abroad foreign ideas of husbandry. The Flemish 

 especially afforded an inexhaustible source of information on 

 this head. They taught the Tudor Englishman many of his 

 trades, filled his gardens with plants delightful to both taste 

 and smell, and by the introchiction of root crops and other 

 vegetables supplied his table with fresh meat and antiscorbutic 

 green food throughout the wintfr. Not only were we at this 

 epoch their inferiors in agricultural and horticultural know- 

 ledge, but our municipal buildings were architecturally not 

 to be compared with the Flemish commercial halls of the 



* Society in the Elizabethan A(je, cli. ii., Tlie Steward. 



