NEW IMPLEMENTS 303 



the tenant ; in either of such events the tenant is entitled to 

 compensation. 



This compensation for disturbance is in direct opposition to 

 the recommendation of the Commission of 1894,^ and seems to 

 be an unwarrantable interference with the owner's manage- 

 ment of his own land. 



Another benefit, and one long needed, was conferred on 

 farmers by the Ground Game Act of 1880, 43 & 44 Vict., c. 

 I 47. Before the Act the tenant had by common law the ex- 

 clusive right to the game, including hares and rabbits, unless 

 it was reserved to the landlord, which was usually the case. 

 By this Act the right to kill ground game, which often worked 

 terrible havoc in the tenant's crops, was rendered inseparable 

 from the occupation of the land, though the owner may reserve 

 to himself a concurrent right. One consequence of this Act 

 has been that the hare has disappeared from many parts of 

 England. 



The greatest improvement in implements during this period 

 was in the direction of reaping and mowing machines, which 

 have now attained a high degree of perfection. As early as 

 1780 the Society of Arts offered a gold medal for a reaping 

 machine, but it was not till 181a that John Common of 

 Denwick, Northumberland, invented a machine which em- 

 bodied all the essential principles of the modern reaper. 

 Popular hostility to the machine was so great that Common 

 made his early trials by moonlight, and he ceased from working 

 on them.^ His machine was improved by the Browns of 

 Alnwick, who sold some numbers in 1833, and shortly after- 

 wards emigrated to Canada taking with them models of 

 Common's reapers. M^'Cormick, the reputed inventor of the 

 reaping machine, knew the Browns, and obtained from them 

 a model of Common's machine which was almost certainly the 

 father of the famous machine exhibited by him at the Great 



^ Parliamentary Reports^ Commissioners (1897), xv. 96. 

 « R. A. S. E. Journal (1892), p. 63. 



