AGENT. 
ard’s bailiff—is appointed over a district or de- 
partment of the estate, and attends to the condi- 
tion of the woods, the fences, the hedge-trees, 
the gates, the roads, the water-courses, and the 
buildings, to the stocking of commons, to the 
prevention of encroachments, and to the repres- 
sion of all sources of damage whether among ten- 
ants or among interlopers and strangers. The 
book-keeper—also called the office-clerk and the 
under-steward—forms the registers of the estate, 
makes out rentals, keeps the accounts, and assists 
in all the more immediate and responsible duties 
of the stewardship. The solicitor, attorney, or 
law-assistant, is a professional person, occasionally 
called in, and is employed only when the steward 
does not possess a sufficient amount of legal 
| knowledge and accountantship to perform the 
duties ; he is not a desirable officiate upon an 
estate ; yet, when unavoidably employed, he 
usually, for a comparatively small salary or allow- 
ance, collects the rents, keeps the accounts, and 
gives requisite advice to the other officers of the 
estate. The land-surveyor is likewise a profes- 
_ sional man; and is employed, as occasions re- 
| quire, to measure and map portions of the estate, 
| to act as a referee or an arbiter, and to effect an 
amicable adjustment of disputes. 
The farm-steward—usually called in England 
the farm-bailiff, and in Scotland the grieve—is 
the farmer’s chief assistant, and often his repre- 
sentative and second-self, upon a large farm of 
either tillage or mixed husbandry. He ought to 
have a tolerably good education, a knowledge of 
accounts, ability to measure work, land, and tim- 
ber, and a thorough acquaintance with all the 
| departments of practical farming, from the coars- 
est cases of the farm-yard to the nicest manipula- 
tions of the husbandman’s art. He inspects and 
controls the field-workers and the ploughmen; he 
exercises all authority over the farm during the 
farmer’s absence or temporary incapacity; he 
has charge of the corn-barn, the granaries, and 
the provision-stores; he performs all the nicer 
and more responsible duties of the farm, but sel- 
dom works with horses, or stoops to offices of 
drudgery or hard labour; and he ought to be 
active, considerate, shrewd, and upright,—con- 
stantly studying the combination of the interests 
of his master with the utmost possible comfort 
of the servants.—The bailiff and gardener, or the 
gardener and grieve, is a mongrel officiate be- 
tween farm-steward and kitchen-gardener ; he 
seldom excels in the duties of either of his capa- 
cities ; and he is usually found only on farms of 
small extent and indifferent condition. — The 
forester or head woodsman has a similar charge 
over woodlands to that which the land-reeve pos- 
sesses over an arable district of an estate; and 
he directs and superintends the operations of 
planting, pruning, rearing, barking, and felling 
trees, of making charcoal, and of forming, thin- 
ning, or otherwise managing fences, coppices, 
and plantations. The demesne-steward conducts 
AGREEMENT. 69 
the management and business of the parks, lawns, 
and other home-grounds immediately around a | 
mansion; he even extends his care over the | 
whole of an estate, when it is small in extent, 
and wholly retained by its proprietor; he like- 
wise wields influence in the stables, in the gar- 
den, and in other departments; and he may be 
regarded as discharging, within the demesne or 
the estate, the duties of a land-steward, a bailiff, 
and a forester, and, in some degree also, those of 
a house-steward.—Other officials than those we 
have named cannot properly be included in the | 
class of agents, and will be noticed in the article 
FarmM-Servants: which see. 
AGISTMENT. The eating of crops by cattle 
upon the ground, or the pasturing of another 
person’s cattle for hire. “If,” says Blackstone, 
“a man takes in a horse or other cattle to graze 
and depasture in his grounds, which the law calls 
agistment, he takes them upon an implied con- 
tract to return them on demand to the owner. 
He cannot, like an inn-keeper, retain them till 
payment.”—The tithe exigible from crops eaten 
upon the ground, or from pasturage consumed 
by hire, is called the tithe of agistment. This 
tithe, in the case of eaten crops, is estimated 
according to the value of what is supposed to be 
consumed ; and, in the case of grasslands, it is 
payable on clover and similar crops, when first 
fed and then permitted to run to seed,—on grass- 
crops first depastured and afterwards cut down, 
—and, with some exceptions, on whatever pasture 
lands within a parish are occupied by cattle which 
are untitheable as live stock, and are sold or re- 
moved from the parish. The agistment tithe is 
calculated from the time of the cattle being 
severally placed upon the land till that of their 
being turned off; and it is usually rated at one- 
tenth of the rack-rent of the land, or at one-tenth 
of the hire paid by strangers for the cattle’s graz- 
ing, or at one-tenth of the rate usually charged 
in the neighbourhood for pasturing, or, in the 
case of feeding upon turnips, at such an estimated 
rate per head of cattle as shall correspond to the 
value of the crop. Exceptions to the payment 
of this tithe occur in the case of all depastured 
aftergrass of meadows which, in the same season, 
have yielded a crop of hay,—in the case of all 
stall-fed or straw-yard cattle, tithe being exigible 
from the cut or removed crops on which these 
are fed,—in the case of all cattle which become 
profitable to the tithe-owner by the production 
of young, or by being milked, or shorn,—and in 
the case of all working cattle which are employed 
wholly or partially within the parish, of all cows 
which are maintained for the supply of the far- 
mer’s family, of all sheep and oxen which are 
slaughtered for consumption on the farm, and 
of all young stock which are reared for. the 
plough or the dairy, and not removed from their 
native parish. 
AGREEMENT. The statement of conditions 
between tenant and landlord, on which a farm is 
