324 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



intensive agriculture was socially desirable, and also profitable 

 to the farmers where their relations to the land were so adjusted 

 as to guarantee to them just returns upon their investments. 

 The earliest attempts at improving the agriculture of the 

 country at once brought forward the tenant problem. In 1649 

 Walter Blith wrote : * " If a tenant be at ever so great pains or 

 cost for improving of his land, he doth thereby but occasion 

 a great rack upon himself, or else invest his landlord with his 

 cost and labor gratis, or at best lies at his landlord's mercy 

 for requital, which occasions a neglect of good husbandry to 

 his own, the land, the landlord, and the kingdom's suffering." 



For more than a century the rural economists of England 

 have been trying to solve this problem. Hence it is in England 

 that the tenant problem can best be studied in the light of 

 history. 



Prior to the introduction of the new agriculture, which move- 

 ment became important during the latter half of the eighteenth 

 century, the tenant farmers of England usually held their lands 

 " at will," without any written agreements. Under this tenure, 

 the common law and the customs of the estates formed the only 

 tie between owners and tenants, and either party could bring 

 the tenancy to a close, by giving six months' notice to the other. 2 

 Towards the close of the eighteenth century, it became a com- 

 mon custom, where land was held from year to year, to draw 

 up legal agreements, by which the tenants bound themselves 

 " to the fulfillment of certain clauses and conditions." 3 But 

 the most significant movement of this period was that in favor 

 of leases for a term of years. The rural economists of that time 

 were quite generally of the opinion that long leases were neces- 

 sary wherever the farmers were expected to make investments 

 in or upon the land, such as require several years to yield their 

 full return. It was stated in 1799 that the improvements which 

 had taken place in England prior to that time had been almost 



1 Thorold Rogers, "Work and Wages," pp. 458-450. 



5 Loudon, "Encyclopedia of Agriculture," p. 764; also, W. Marshall, "Landed 

 Estates," 1806, p. 378. 



3 H. E. Strickland, "Agricultural Survey of the East Riding of Yorkshire." 



