322 AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION AND POOR LAW 



becoming purchasers. Their biddings forced existing owners into 

 ruinous competition ; they mortgaged their ancestral acres to buy 

 up outlying properties or round off their boundaries. As much as 

 forty-five years' purchase was given for purely agricultural land. 

 The same spirit of competition prompted farmers to offer extravagant 

 rents for land. Farms were put up to auction, and the tenancy fell 

 to the highest bidder. The more prudent had left business in 1806. 

 Many of the new men entered on their holdings with insufficient or 

 borrowed capital. Money was still made in farming ; but, instead 

 of being reah'sed, it was put back into the land, where, so long as 

 prices rose, or were even maintained, it proved a profitable invest- 

 ment. Among all classes, including landowners and farmers, a 

 higher standard of living prevailed. Country mansions had been 

 built, rebuilt, or enlarged, and costly improvements effected in the 

 equipment of farms, often by means of loans ; heavy jointures 

 and portions had been charged on estates ; farmers and their wives 

 had either altered their simpler habits, or brought with them into 

 their new business more luxurious modes of life. The whole fabric 

 rested on the continuance of the war-prices. When these began to 

 fall, the crash came. Profits were reduced by a half ; burdens 

 remained the same. Tenants-at-will could at least quit their hold- 

 ings. But tenants occupying under long leases found themselves 

 in a difficult position. Landlords could not meet their liabilities, 

 unless their rents were maintained ; without reductions of rent, the 

 bankruptcy of their tenants seemed inevitable. 



In the period 1814-16 the agricultural industry passed suddenly 

 from prosperity to extreme depression. At first farmers met their 

 engagements out of capital. When that was exhausted, their only 

 resource was to sell their corn as soon as it was threshed, or their 

 stock, for what it would fetch. The great quantity of grain thus 

 thrown on the market in a limited time lowered prices for producers, 

 and the subsequent advance, which benefited only the dealers, 

 suggested to landlords that no reductions of rent were necessary, 

 Farms were thrown up ; notices to quit poured in ; numbers oi 

 tenants absconded. Large tracts of land were untenanted and 

 often uncultivated. In 1815 three thousand acres in a small district 

 of Huntingdonshire were abandoned, and nineteen farms in the Isle 

 of Ely were without tenants. Bankers pressed for their advances, 

 landlords for their rents, tithe-owners for their tithe, tax-collectors 

 for their taxes, tradesmen for their bills. Insolvencies, composi- 



