236 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



grown from the acorns he had himself planted.^ Between 

 1776 and 1843 (the date of his death) he is said to have 

 spent £S3^>99'^ ^^ improving his estate, without reckoning 

 the large sums spent on his house and demesne, the home 

 farm, and his marsh farm of 459 acres. This expenditure 

 paid in the long run, but when he entered upon it, it must 

 have seemed very doubtful if this would be the case. A good 

 understanding between landlord and tenant was the basis of 

 his policy, and to further this he let his farms on long leases, 

 at moderate rents, with few restrictions. When farmers improved 

 their holdings on his estate the rent was not raised on them, 

 so that the estate benefited greatly, and good tenants were often 

 rewarded by having excellent houses built for them ; so good, 

 indeed, that his political opponents the Tories, whom he, as a 

 staunch Whig detested, made it one of their complaints 

 against him that he built palaces for farm-houses. At first 

 he met with that stolid opposition to progress which seems 

 the particular characteristic of the farmer. For sixteen years 

 no one followed him in the use of the drill, though it was no 

 new thing; and when it was adopted he reckoned its use 

 spread at the rate of a mile a year. Yet eventually he had 

 his reward ; his estate came to command the pick of English 

 tenant farmers, who never left it except through old age, 

 and would never live under any other landlord. Even the 

 Radical Cobbett, to whom, as to most of his party, landlords 

 were, and are, the objects of inveterate hatred, said that every 

 one who knew him spoke of him with affection. Coke was 

 the first to distinguish between the adaptability of the different 

 kinds of grass seeds to different soils, and thereby made the 

 hitherto barren lands of his estate better pasture land than 

 that of many rich counties. Carelessness about the quality 

 of grasses sown was universal for a long time. The farmer 

 took his seeds from his own foul hayrick, or sent to his neigh- 

 bour for a supply of rubbish ; even Bake well derived his stock 

 ^ A. Stirling, 0^. cit. i. 264. 



