The Farm Labourers of England and Wales. 673 
ignored by those who dwell on the hardship of turning out a 
cottage tenant because he cannot get on with a particular farmer. 
The man who succeeds him at his work on the farm, if not 
allowed to occupy the cottage, may have to live far distant from 
the place of his occupation, and this is a much greater hardship 
than being compelled to leave a farm cottage when ceasing to 
work on the farm. 
Cottage rents on the large estates are almost uniformly low, 
Is. to Is. dd. a week being most common, while it is seldom that 
they are more than 2s., and some small cottages are let at dd. to 
8 d. But in many villages the rents are from 4s. to 5s., and 
sometimes up to 6s., a week as the maximum, where they are let 
by small owners. As a rule, rents are lowest where wages are 
lowest, and highest where w r ages are highest, at least where they 
are commercial rents ; but this is not by any means always the 
case on the large estates, for there they are generally not over 
2s. a week, however high wages may be, and, as already stated, 
are more often Is. to Is. dd. Cottage rents are not graduated in 
proportion to the value of cottages, as the rents of the best dwell- 
ings on the large estates are commonly lower than those of the 
worst, or all but the worst of cottages let by small investors. 
Farmers who let cottages hired with their farms almost 
invariably pay the rates upon them, and the large landowners 
usually compound for the rates on the cottages which they let 
directly, but not invariably in the Midlands and the Northern 
Counties. It is certain, however, that the vast majority of 
agricultural labourers pay no rates directly, and, where they are 
charged only nominal rents — sums which do not pay the lowest 
commercial rate of interest on the cost of construction — it 
cannot truly be said that they pay rates indirectly. 
Gardens, Allotments, &c. 
Gardens attached to cottages are much more general or 
much larger in some parts of the country than in others, while 
there are also great differences in these respects among the 
several parishes of every district. As a rule, cottages on farms 
have large gardens attached to them, and this is also commonly 
the case in small villages and hamlets in which the few houses 
are often spread over a wide extent of g.pund. But in the 
open villages ” and in other large ones the dwellings are in 
many cases too closely packed to allow of gardens of any con- 
siderable size, and in some of them large proportions of the 
cottages have no attached gardens, or only mere scraps. In 
such cases separate gardens are sometimes provided for the 
VOL. iv. t. s. — 16 y y 
