Note 205 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

This is in perfect keeping with our theory. In former times land was abundant, and therefore the lord “had no wish to get rid of a tenant,” for he “knew no other way of getting his land cultivated”. But now sheep farming made appropriation of the whole of the land possible, and so the lord was no longer in need of the villeins; he even went so far as to evict those whom his ancestors had attached to the soil. And even where the cultivators remained on the land, they often, and not always voluntarily, became leaseholders instead of copyholders; and “in many cases a lease was but a stepping-stone to tenure at will”205. The lords no longer contented themselves with the customary payments; instead of villeins they wanted leaseholders, whose rents they could raise at the end of each term, according as the value of the land had increased. “Rents were raised with great rapidity as the tenant had to pay a sum equivalent to the utility of his holding as part of a large pasture farm.”206.