of Edinburgh, Session 1882-83. 
117 
(late when owing to the inveterate habits of a rural people, the main 
features of the early contract must have survived, the stipulation 
that the tenant should supply the houses, (fee., required for the proper 
cultivation of the farm is to be found. In a lease, for instance, so 
early as 1312* it was stipulated that the tenant should supply suit- 
able buildings for himself and his husbandmen, which were to be 
left at the end of the lease ; after an interval of two centuries, under 
the next earliest lease of which I have seen any note, in 151 1 the tenant 
is taken bound to build three onsteads to be inhabited by himself and 
his dependants under pain of forfeiture j a crofter is taken bound to 
build a rood of enclosure for every, cow he has on the lands of the 
principal tenant j and in two cases tenants were taken bound to build 
houses on their farms, but were allowed to retain a part of their rents 
to assist them in doing so. These were church lands, and we may 
be sure these stipulations represent nothing more severe than the 
usual tenure, but probably the reverse. Now such a system was 
quite consistent with the idea of a partial or temporary sale of 
the subject, which was the bare land, not as in steelbow the land 
equipped with stock and appliances of which the wattled houses of 
these early days formed probably no very important part ; but it was 
quite inconsistent with the more developed ideas of modern economy 
basing the lease on quasi-partnership, and was not suited for our 
modern use with the more important outlays now required for modern 
agriculture. It is well, however, to discern from these examples that 
the principle now universally recognised as the best, which imposes 
on the modern landlord the necessity of supplying all that is required 
for the full equipment and beneficial cultivation of the farm, or of 
recouping to the tenant what he may dispense for such purposes, is ho 
exhumation, as has been often represented, of ancient custom or tenure 
■ — no reverting to a more generous system long forgotten. Antiquity 
knew nothing of the kind, or if the steelbow form of lease is to be 
taken as the archaic type of what is advocated, then the experience 
of seven centuries and the advance in independence of the agricul- 
tural class have demonstrated that that system is unsuitable, for it 
has failed to survive. It may be less interesting but it is certainly 
safer, instead of searching for principles and precedents for our 
present guidance among the archaic systems of the past, to recognise 
that even the highest forms of these were datum lines from which to 
* Innes, Legal Antiquities, pp. 263, 264, 
