390 History of the English Landed Interest. 



of the struggle over its hereditary rights, from the statute of 

 Quia Emptores to that of De Donis, thence to the application 

 of common recoveries and the legislative attacks of Henry 

 VIII. 's reign, until we leave estates tail in much the same 

 stage as conditional fees were in at common law, before 

 mediasval lawyers framed the Act of De Donis. The tenant 

 in tail could, at the period in which we take leave of him, 

 aliene his lands and tenements not only by fine and recovery, 

 but also by other means ; he was liable to forfeiture for high 

 treason, and he could charge his estates both with reasonable 

 leases, and with such of his debts as were due to the Crown, 

 or had been contracted with his fellow subjects in a course 

 of extensive commerce.^ This was not the free trade in land 

 which is the dream of the modern Radical, it did not affect 

 reversionary interests one tithe so severely as the recent 

 Settled Estates Acts have done ; but it was a step towards that 

 Elysium which alone would seem to satisfy the landless inter- 

 ests of this present age. 



The task yet before us is to carry down to the present date 

 this study of the gTeat English landed interest, and in so doing 

 describe how its exclusive proprietary rights were bit by bit 

 abandoned through the moderation of an enlightened age ; 

 how its system of agriculture improved under the beneficent 

 guidance of science, and how its worst customs were altered in 

 obedience to the advanced spirit of these later times. We 

 have seen enough both of English noble and peasant, to be 

 sure that a wise spirit of compromise will order all the changes 

 about which we still have to speak, as it had ordered most of 

 those already recounted ; and we shall be sure that the sense 

 of moderation which even curbed the repressive tendencies of 

 an aristocracy in the zenith of seignorial jurisdiction, will 

 unite with that independence of character which clung to the 

 peasant in the most degrading days of his serfdom, until this 

 country of England shall have become, what at this day it has 

 long been, a beacon light to the foreigner still groping after 

 freedom. 



* Blackstonc, Comvi., bk. ii., ch. vii. 



