History of Agricultural Rent in England 27 



the undertaker of the Company, and he 

 was to get 95,000 acres for himself out 

 of the whole lands reclaimed. 



It is impossible to go further into the 

 details. The general result may be indi- 

 cated by two or three sentences from the 

 book itself. " If ever," says the present 

 Duke, " there was an estate to which 

 coUectivist ideas regarding land are not 

 applicable, it is Thorney. Only 300 acres 

 of culturable land came to the house 

 of Bedford on the dissolution of the 

 monasteries. The remainder of the lordship 

 was won from the sea and the swamps 

 by patriotic enterprise, hard work, and 

 lavish expenditure." 



This is, of course, in magnitude and in 

 kind a case of exceptional interest, but on 

 a lesser scale and in different ways, from 

 the seventeenth century onwards, the great 



