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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
temporary use of his farm for a certain price payable by instalments 
during the lease ; he was more a temporary feuar, or a copy holder, 
than a tenant in our sense of the term. And herein lies a very 
important and curious distinction between ancient and modern 
economy, which is the key to many difficulties ; with us, the price 
of an article and its value are almost convertible terms, but it was 
not so of old, it was not so not very long ago. Price was fixed in 
the ancient times I speak of by custom, and when we read with 
wonder of statesmen in even modern times seeking to fix the price 
of viands by enactment they were only struggling with the idea 
which in pristine societies fixed price by inveterate custom. Even 
now in India there are districts where the price of shoes for instance 
is fixed by inviolate custom, and the shoemakers adapt themselves to 
circumstances not by altering the price but by modifying the quality 
of their goods ; and not very long ago in some European countries 
the price of the loaf was fixed and its dimensions fluctuated. 
How in England we know that the rent of the land has not even 
yet borne the same intimate relation to its value it has done in 
Scotland ; the rent which a man’s father and grandfather paid before 
him has lingered there as an almost customary rent different in 
degree rather than in principle from the really customary rent of the 
copyhold tenure ; and the commercial principle which our modern 
practice especially in Scotland has introduced of close identity 
between value and price has in England penetrated with the slow- 
ness proverbial to agriculture into the relations bearing on land. I 
think there may be some of the unsolved problems of this relation 
upon which the consideration of what I have thus referred to may 
throw a little light. 
Another ancient fact bearing on the landlord and tenant of our 
modern experience seems worthy of some note j the pristine form of 
that relation was, as I have already shown, of an alternative character. 
The tenancy might be one practically of steelbow, in which the land- 
lord supplied stock, implements, and the scanty housing if any ; or it 
might be that by which the landlord sold temporarily the use of his 
land only, leaving the tenant to supply himself with all that he 
required for its cultivation. It was this latter form mainly that 
survived into later times. "We have of course no written leases re- 
maining to us of the very early times to which I have been specially 
referring; but those early leases which do remain entered into at a 
