THE EVESHAM CUSTOM 179 



expensive business of planting up land with fruit. 

 In an ordinary way a tenant who plants fruit trees 

 does so at his own risk ; they are his landlord's 

 property; should he die or leave he will get no 

 compensation for the extra value they have imparted 

 to the holding he may even be rack-rented on the 

 improvement he has made. In Kent custom gives 

 the tenant the bare cost of the trees if he goes out 

 within seven years of planting, but he will get no 

 compensation for making an established cherry orchard, 

 which may have doubled the fee-simple of the land. 

 Men have planted, relying (generally with confidence) 

 on the equity and forbearance of the landlords, but 

 such a system does not encourage enterprise. On 

 the other hand, the landlord may rightly ask to be 

 saved from rash speculations on unsuitable land ; in 

 any case he does not care for the possibility of being 

 called upon to buy a lot of standing fruit trees at 

 a valuation which he may not be able to recover from 

 a new tenant. The Evesham custom made the 

 planting the business of the tenant, and threw on 

 him the responsibility of realising its value ; if he 

 wished to leave he had to find a new tenant with 

 whom he made his own bargain for the standing fruit, 

 often worth more than the land, and the landlord 

 had to accept the new tenant or buy the trees himself. 

 As a custom which had grown up by degrees and 

 become familiar to all parties, this system worked 

 admirably and was just between landlord and tenant ; 

 but it is looked coldly upon outside its own district, 

 and the attempt to extend it by the Market Gardens 

 Act over the whole country has only resulted in landlords 

 refusing to let farms except with a specific agreement 

 that they are not to be regarded as market gardens 

 under the Act. The English landlord dreads the 



