Small Holdings. 85 
the land was cultivated by yeomen and labourers, these latter, 
however, forming but a small proportion of the rural population. 1 
The yeomen lived upon the land, and were its holders, either 
as freeholders or under such conditions of copyhold and lease- 
hold as afforded tenure nearly as secure as freehold. The 
labourers held cottages and gardens under tenure as privi- 
leged as that of the yeomen, and were, in addition, entitled 
to rights of common, to fuel, to litter, to thatch, and to 
pasturage for cows and donkeys. There was a general security 
of possession to all grades of agricultural society. The feudal 
system, adapted to the needs of its time, had become replaced 
by a system which may now be regarded as absolutely ideal. 
But the system of entail, the outcome of the desire of the feudal 
lords to transmit their vast landed possessions unbroken to their 
posterity, which had been evaded during the peaceful period 
between the beginning of the fifteenth and near the middle of 
the seventeenth centuries, when land became freely dealt with 
and the number of owners greatly increased, at the time of the 
Revolution again asserted itself. In the stress of the Civil War 
the interests of their posterity once more became paramount in 
the minds of holders of land. No man was safe, nor heritage 
secure, in the general unsettlement of affairs. Legal subtleties 
were again invoked, and the system of entail, however modified, 
once more secured from courts of law the claims of the children 
to estates of which they might be deprived if the parties in power 
chanced to be hostile to their fathers. The system tended 
again to the aggregation of estates and the diminution of the 
number of the owners. 
But other causes were at work. To the ownership of land 
exceptional privileges were attached, governmental, social, 
and sporting, and the influence and position as chiefs of the 
large districts which these privileges afforded. It became 
the ambition of rich traders and professional men to join the 
ranks of this influential class of landowners, and win for them- 
selves these great and exclusive advantages. The competition 
amongst the landless rich led to an artificial increase in the 
value of all land that came into the market, and soon land 
became more an object of luxury than a means of investment 
for mere livelihood. Tempted, therefore, by artificial prices, 
entails were frequently rendered nil , and small owners readily 
thrust their holdings upon the market. When, at last, the 
common lands were enclosed, the deathblow was dealt to the 
1 Vide Agrarian Tenures, by the Rt. Hon. G. Shaw Lefevre, M.P., to which I 
desire to express my obligations for valuable information. 
