lO AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION 



on the line of the downs, large tracts of land which have 

 in past years grown fair wheat and barley, excellent 

 turnip crops, and have produced some of the finest sheep 

 in the country, are now out of cultivation and practically 

 worthless. The freehold value has enormously depreci- 

 ated throughout this district. On the Duchy of Corn- 

 wall farms in Berkshire rents have fallen from 35s in 

 1880 to 4s Sd in 1893. 



In districts like the Vale of Aylesbury, the rich 

 pastures have not suffered though the price of milk has 

 fallen, but even there land values are shown to be 

 depreciated by sales. Hertfordshire has seen many 

 changes of tenancy on the poor and heavy lands ; 

 tenants are impoverished, land worse cultivated.^ But 

 the condition of this county is altogether better than 

 the adjacent districts of Essex, and farms near railways 

 have by catering for the London markets secured a 

 degree of profit where worked with skill and capital. 



As to Wiltshire, on the great chalk tableland of 

 Salisbury Plain, where 57 per cent, of the total cultivated 

 area is still under the plough, there have been reduc- 

 tion of rent from 30 to 75 per cent., while farmers have 

 lost heavily, the large holdings of this district requiring 

 the constant application of a considerable capital. Sir 

 Michael Hicks Beach vividly illustrates the depression 

 in Wiltshire by his evidence that, with the heavy reduc- 

 tions of rent, tenants were neither gaining or losing 

 money, but just holding on, and, on the other hand, the 

 rents were not " living rents " for the landlord. Some 

 witnesses doubted whether any reduction of rent could 

 keep the land in cultivation, but the course of events has 

 led rather to the abandonment of farms. The poor and 

 thin downlands were broken up between the forties and 

 the seventies, and are now " tumbling back " to their 

 former condition, but deteriorated so that the old 

 grasses will take many years to get back to what they 

 were forty years ago. To some extent agriculture has been 

 helped by the careful system of water meadows adopted. 



Where dairy farming is possible, and has been well 

 'A. Spencer, Aylesbury and Herts, pp. 21, 22. 



