English Tenant Farmers’ Tolerance Towards Lords Of The Manor

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 79, 9 August 1948, Page 5

English Tenant Farmers’ Tolerance Towards Lords Of The Manor

(By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) Stratford-upon-Avon, July 17. . I A surprise English farmers stored up for me was their tolerance towards the landlord. A lot has been written about surviving feudal forms in England. I had rather expected English farmers to join the reformers in deploring the Lord of the Manor. "But from none of the farmers I visited during a week’s tour of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire, the Vale of Evesham and Warwickshire did I hear dispraise of the landlord. It w 7 as not denied that Britain was not without bad landlords, but the Lord of the Manor seemed generally to be preferred to the alternatives offering. First of these alternatives is ownership of his land by the working farmer. About all this has to offer these days, I was told, is pride of possession. Tenancy is so secured by law that a landlord cannot dispossess except for shocking farming. At the same time he has to bear the worry of maintaining facilities and watching land values. He may still raise the rent, but the tenant farmer has the right to appeal to an independent arbitrating body. , Sure of remaining "on his land, the tenant farmer may go ahead and plan his farming far into the future, knowing he will reap the benefit of his own toil and judgment. Tenant farmers who spoke to considered that with land prices as high as they were today, they did better to put their money into capital improvements on the holding they farmed, rather than run them-

selves short of ready cash by buying it outright. In some farming areas, notably the Vale of Evesham, a tenant may nominate a successor, and this nomination is customarily taken into account. Support for this principle is written into the Agriculture Act, 1945. The burden of death duties on big estates has forced the selling of parcels of land. Some estates, as is presumably the design, will have to sell up altogether to meet the next death duties. The parcels of land thus sold are often offered first to the tenants then farming them. In the main, however, the prices are beyond the small farmer, and the land is taken up as an investment by individuals or syndicates from the cities. The purchase money has usually been made in industry, and the investors reason that if there is going to be a slump in this hungry world, the land will be the J- place to feel it. It may be questioned whether the social theories leading to the break up of the big estates are implemented by transferring ownership to wealthy industrialists. Farmers say the investors do not take the same interest in their land as did the Lord of the Manor. Syndicates are chillsome landlords by comparison. So it is that about one-third of the farmers in Britain own the land they work, and a goodly portion of the remainder are cheerfully disposed towards their local squire, now shorn of his feudal power, but still discharging the obligations which went with it.