Land Hunger: Land as a Commodity and as a Status Good, England, 1500–1910

Land Hunger: Land as a Commodity and as a Status Good,England, 1500–1910*

Gregory Clark

Department of Economics, University of California, Davis, Davis, California 95616-8578E-mail: [email protected]

Historians believe that land in preindustrial societies was sought partly for status. Laterland became a commodity like any other. Per unit of monetary return preindustrial landprices should thus be higher than those of nonstatus assets. Surprisingly in England from1560 to 1800 the price of land per £1 of return was little above that of nonstatus assets.Only in the 19th century does a possible price premium emerge. Any change in the landmarket in England from 1560 to 1910 was the reverse of the expected: from land as acommodity in preindustrial England to land as a status good in industrial England.

r 1998 Academic Press

1. INTRODUCTION

The work of Macfarlane and other historians has ever more strongly empha-sized that even in the 16th century England was a market oriented individualisticsociety. But historians have clung to the idea that in at least one respect Englandlong held to the values of the agrarian past. For they have generally assumed thatland still had special status, giving the owner pride and position in society as wellas rental income.1 Landowners were not just humdrum investors: They werepeople who derived a special prestige from their lordship over the soil. Land gavethem a visible position in society in a way that other investments such asmortgages, annuities, or rent charges did not. Thus land sold for more than itsmaterial returns would imply. It is estimated by John Habakkuk, for example, thatpeople sacrificed 50% of their income by investing in land as opposed tomortgages in the 17th century.2 In the 18th century the premium was smaller, but£1 of income from land was still reckoned to cost up to 33% more than the same

* This research was funded by NSF Grant #SES 91-22191 and a scholarship from the IRIS(Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector) program of the University of Maryland. Avner Offerprovided very useful suggestions about how to measure the premium paid for land. Paul Amoreprovided able research assistance and his work was sponsored in part by the Institute of GovernmentalAffairs at the UC Davis Internship program. Anthony Clark provided invaluable computer skills.

1 Macfarlane (1978).2 Habakkuk (1952).

EXPLORATIONS IN ECONOMIC HISTORY35, 59–82 (1998)ARTICLE NO. EH970689

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income from a mortgage.3 Avner Offer similarly finds that from 1790 to 1880those who purchased land rather than government long term debt sacrificed about25% of their income.4 He uses this land premium to explain why the bulk of theland in England from the 18th century on was farmed by tenants. Farmers whohad purely commercial interests in agriculture would prefer to rent and investtheir income elsewhere given the premium they would have to pay for land.

The situation assumed for preindustrial England can certainly be observed inother preindustrial societies. In India, for example, land in the late 19th and early20th centuries did seem to have had the special status assumed by historians ofpreindustrial England. Land could be obtained either through outright ownershipor through purchasing a usufruct mortgage which gave the mortgage owner theright to cultivate the land as the interest payment until the mortgage was repaid.The cost of land obtained through mortgage was about half that of land obtainedthrough outright purchase. ‘‘Owning’’ land had value to peasants in the Punjab,even when they derived no material return from the land (as when it was in thehands of the mortgage holder).5 Similarly Warriner, writes that ‘‘land hunger’’was a general feature of the peasant economies of eastern Europe in the early 20thcentury, and that consequently ‘‘in countries with widely dispersed peasantproperty the price of land tends to rise higher than its income-yielding capacity, ifthis were estimated by the rate of interest.’’6

Recently Robert Allen (1988) has disputed that people paid a premium for landownership in preindustrial England. He accepts that the net return on landbetween 1600 and 1815 was on average 2% less than that on mortgages, butargues that the difference period by period can be accounted for by expectedcapital gains on land. Land yielded a rate of return equivalent to other assets oncewe include capital gains.

Using the rent charge, an asset more comparable to land than mortgages orgovernment debt, this paper argues that Allen’s conclusion that there was nopremium paid for land is correct for the years before 1800, but that there waspossibly a premium in the 19th century as Offer argues. Excluding capital gainsfrom holding land, on average those who purchased land rather than comparableassets between 1560 and 1800 sacrificed at maximum only 9% of their income.Adding in the capital gains the net realized returns for the two assets were equal

3 See Habakkuk (1952), Stone (1965), Clay (1974), Beckett (1984), Clay (1984a, p. 163), andHabakkuk (1994).

4 See Offer (1991, pp. 14 and 16).5 The usufruct mortgage gave the mortgagor possession of the land as payment of the interest on the

loan until the mortgage sum was repaid, and the repayment could be made in any year after the harvestat the discretion of the borrower. The amount offered for land on such mortgages should not equal thefull price of the land. For if nominal land values increase the owner will get the benefit but themortgagor will not. But in periods of little expected inflation in nominal land values, such as the late19th century, if land was sought only for its material returns, then the mortgage value of land should beclose to the price. In practice land was mortgaged for only about half its sale value from 1848 on. SeeNarain (1932) and Kessinger (1974).

6 Warriner (1939, p. 163).

60 GREGORY CLARK


from 1560 to 1910. There is, however, no sign that capital gains were actuallyanticipated period by period by purchasers, as Allen argues. The size of thepremium paid for land in any decade is not related to rent movements over thepast 10 or 20 years. But the small apparent premium paid for land compared toother assets before 1800 (excluding capital gains) may still have stemmed from ageneralized expectation of possible capital gains from land.

Further evidence that prestige reasons for buying land were not particularlyimportant comes from the fact that large and small purchasers got the same returnfrom land, and that there is no indication that areas of the country, such as thevicinity of London, where the demand for land from prestige purchasers wasgreater had relatively higher prices for land per £1 of rental income than for otherassets.

A second objective of this paper is to lay out decadal estimates of the returnfrom holding land and other assets in England between 1540 and 1839, where formost of these years there is no comparable series on returns available.

2. THE MOTIVES FOR BUYING LAND

It is often asserted that land had status value for many purchasers in preindus-trial England, though most of the writing on this topic has concentrated onwealthy purchasers. Writing of the 16th and early 17th centuries, for example,Lawrence Stone (1965) notes that those who made money in trade, industry, thelaw, and politics ‘‘hastened to turn their wealth into a landed estate,’’ since it was‘‘supreme as a status symbol.’’7

Thepsychicbenefits of land ownership, as John Habakkuk (1994) calls them,were many for the wealthy. Landed estates exhibited wealth in a way that otherassets did not.

. . . land was the most visible and therefore the most effective way of exhibiting wealth. Noone could tell the worth of a money fortune or assess the value of the assets in which it washeld. But anyone could make a shrewd guess at the value of 1,000 acres.

The estate allowed for enjoyment of a distinctive and prestigious lifestyle,involving entertainment, sport, and a place at the head of the local ruralcommunity. Finally the estate granted entry to a variety of social and politicalpositions—magistrate, High Sheriff, Lord Lieutenant of a county, and member-ship in Parliament. ‘‘In many cases the acquisition of an estate was the prelude toan attempt to enter Parliament.’’ Not only the very rich who purchased estates of500 to 30,000 acres would get these benefits. Country estates had attractions evento those who made modest fortunes in a profession, by commerce, or in war.Habakkuk details how many such men invested in more modest ‘‘mini-estates’’ of200 acres or less. ‘‘The mini-estate however did enable the owner to ‘play the

7 Stone (1965, pp. 39 and 41).

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squire’ in villages where there was no resident estate owner . . . In many countiessporting life was sustained by the activities of such men.’’8

Habakkuk believes that as a consequence of theirpsychicreturns estate priceswere bid up beyond what their money rents would indicate so that they yielded alow monetary return as an investment. Christopher Clay also accepts that to getthe social advantages a landed estate conveyed investors in the 17th and 18thcenturies had to accept lower rates of return on capital.9

Habakkuk believes, however, that ordinary farmland was treated much more asan investment, with a consequently higher rate of return. There was thus asegmented land market operating with different rates of return. Since there was nointrinsic distinction between land formed into large and small estates and regularfarmland it is hard to understand how this segmentation would be maintained.Estates were assembled and enlarged by putting together smaller pieces of‘‘commercial’’ land, and land was sold from estates to reenter the ‘‘commercial’’sector.10 If estate land sold for more per £1 of rent, then there should have beensubstantial gains available to speculators who put together purchases of ordinaryfarmland to form estate and mini-estate sized parcels.

It is also widely believed that the prestige demand for land drove up prices inlocations such as the area around London where there were many potentialpurchasers of land for the purpose of forming estates or mini-estates. As Claynotes,

Almost every author who dealt with the subject pointed out that near London and othermajor urban and industrial areas, purchase rates were noticeably higher than elsewhere,owing to the demand from those who had made money in commerce and industry. Andclearly it was so.11

Habbakuk also argues that the motive of enjoying the country life led to anenhanced demand for estates at a convenient distance from London.

The growth of London as a social centre induced some landowners whose main seats layinconveniently remote from London to buy not only a town house, but a country mansionwithin easy reach of the capital.12

Those who write on the smaller landowners, the yeomen and husbandmen, alsosuggest a desire for land that went beyond its purely income yielding potential.Campbell, describing the yeomen of the late 16th and early 17th centuries talks of

8 Habakkuk (1994, pp. 403 and 613).9 Habakkuk (1994, p. 407), Clay (1984a, p. 163), Clay (1974, p. 185).10 Habakkuk notes that, ‘‘very few established families, at some time in the course of the two

centuries before 1870, did not buy properties in the neighborhood of their main estate’’ (Habakkuk(1994), p. 477).

11 Clay (1974, p. 181).12 Habakkuk (1994, p. 486).

62 GREGORY CLARK


‘‘land hunger,’’ and of the pride of land ownership among the yeomanry.13

Spufford (1974) talks of the ‘‘constant endeavours made by the community toprovide land for as many of its sons as possible (p. 87).’’

The traditional story of the nature of demand for land suggests a number ofempirical tests of whether prestige purchasers were an important part of anysegment of the land market. If all purchases were motivated purely by the incomeearning potential of land, then we should find that:

(1) The monetary return on land was the same as that of comparable assets.(2) The monetary return was the same on all types of land. In particular estate

sized parcels should yield the same return as that on small plots bought bycottagers or yeomen.

(3) The monetary return on land should be the same everywhere, even thoughthere would be many more prestige purchasers available in areas close to Londonthan in areas remote from urban concentrations.

If the land market meets all these conditions, it suggests that the marginalpurchasers of land, those who determined its price, were primarily buying it foreconomic motives in preindustrial England.

3. SOURCES AND METHODS

To measure the cost that investors in land paid for theirpsychicreturns we needto compare the returns on land with a comparable asset in terms of risk. The otherthings that investors could put money into were rent charges, bonds, mortgages,and later government securities. Previous discussions of the return on land in the16th and 17th centuries by Habakkuk, Clay, and Allen have compared the returnon land to that on mortgages. Offer compares the return on land to that ongovernment long term debt from 1790 onward. Both mortgages and governmentdebt are somewhat different assets than land however. Mortgages were repayableat short notice by the borrower and would be repaid or renegotiated if interestrates fell (though the lender could recall or renegotiate if interest rates rose). In the16th century the legal status of mortgages also seems to have been ambiguous.Government debt was similarly subject to reduction of interest rates if rates fell.

Thus to measure the premium paid by purchasers this paper uses a much closersubstitute for land as an investment, the rent charge. The rent charge, whichexisted virtually unchanged from the middle ages to the 20th century, was aperpetual obligation to pay a fixed nominal amount secured by land or other realproperty. It could only be redeemed if both the land owner and the person whoowned the right to the fixed annual payment agreed to its termination.14 Thus likeland rent charges were long term secured investments. Many pieces of land had

13 Campbell (1942, pp. 64–104).14 Rent charges were sometimes also referred to as ‘‘fee farm rents.’’ The rent charge existed from

at least the 12th century. Rent charges were still being created in the 18th century. Later, the maintransactions involving rent charges were their sale to third parties or to the owner of the land. The legalproperties of the rent charge were largely unchanged between the middle ages and the 20th century.See Edwards (1904), Cheshire (1962), and Pollock and Maitland (1895).

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some kind of rent charge attached to them. Unlike bonds or mortgages (orgovernment debt), rent charges were not affected by usury laws so that the returncould vary freely as with land. Also unlike bonds or mortgages rent charges werenot subject to redemption at short notice if interest rates fell or the borrowers’needs changed. As shown in Table 4 rent charges offered a lower return toinvestors than mortgages in 20 of 23 decades since 1680 where we have data onthe return on both. Rent charges were also of comparable risk to land. The defaultrisk was somewhat less than that for owning land outright in that it was generallysecured by land worth considerably more per year than the rent charge. Thus thechances of receiving less than the contracted return were low. But the real returnsfrom the rent charge were more variable since land as a real asset was secureagainst general price inflation.

Rent charges carried little of the social prestige associated with land ownership.The land owner controlled the land directly, farming it himself or renting it totenants. The land owners’ possession was generally visible for all to see. The rentcharge owners, however, could be quite invisible in the local society. They wouldcollect their return from the land owner, but they would have no say over whofarmed the land or what laborers were hired to work the land.

Suppose the price of £1 of land rent isPL, while the price of £1 of income froma rent charge isPC. PL is thus the ‘‘years purchase’’ price of land, which was thecommon way people measured the rate of return on land till at least the 19thcentury. The nominal rate of return on land will be

rL 5 1/PL

assuming for the moment that there are no expectations of rent increases in thefuture on the land. The nominal rate of return on the rent charge similarly will be

rC 5 1/PC

Define the psychic premium from land ownership as

F 5PL 2 PC

PL5

rC 2 rL

rC.

With this definitionF is the fraction of income that a person gives up to invest inland as opposed to investing in rent charges.15 F will vary between 0, where thereis no psychic premium from investing in land, and 1, where the land ownersacrifices all his or her monetary return in order to possess land.

We have to consider that land owners at least sometimes anticipated gettingincreased rents from land in the future, a source of return that was not available

15 The psychic premium from investing in land has been measured differently by different authors.Offer uses (PL 2 PC), the difference in years purchased between land and other assets. Allen uses(rC 2 rL), the difference between rates of return on land and other assets. These two measures can leadto very different conclusions as to whether there was a significant psychic premium from investing inland. Neither measure gives a simple intuitive definition of what the psychic premium from investingin land is. I am grateful to Avner Offer for pointing out the problem of the choice of measure.

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from rent charges, mortgages, bonds, or consols. In this case the full return onowning land will be (rL 1 r), wherer is the rate of increase in nominal rents. Thepsychic premium from owning land will now be given by

F 5rC 2 rL 2 r

rC.

By the mid-17th century the rent charge as a financial instrument began todecline in popularity with the growth of government debt. Consols had anadvantage over rent charges in that they could be easily traded at a known marketprice and with a relatively small transactions cost. Like land the market for rentcharges had a strong local bias, which made the market for this asset thinner.Consols had disadvantages also in that there was a perceived risk of governmentdefault, and the interest rate could fall if market interest rates in general fell. Thusfor the years after 1730 I also compare the return on owning land to the return onconsols.

In measuring the rent from land we have to recognize that the net rent receivedby the landlord is given by

NET RENT5 TENANT’S RENT PAYMENT

1 AVERAGE TIMBER INCOME

2 AVERAGE REPAIR COST

2 TAXES SPECIFIC TO LAND

2 TITHE PAID BY OWNER.

Allen and Offer both make somewhat ad hoc corrections for repair and manage-ment costs and for the relative risk of different assets. Allen for example assumesthat administration, land tax, and repair costs were 0.75% of the value of landafter and 0.38% before 1692. Offer assumes following Thompson (1907) that netrents were 75% of gross rents. But this is just Thompson’s deduction forrepairs—he states that including all deductions net rents were a mere 60–65% ofgross rents!16 Using data from 28,345 observations on plots of land held bycharities I am able to get better estimates of repair costs relative to rents, land taxpayments, extra income earned from timber, and tithe payments by owners for thecharity land for both the years 1819–1826 and 1889–1910. Below I makecorrections on the gross returns for each of these items to derive the net returnfrom land ownership.

The data the paper uses to make this calculation are principally drawn from theaccounts of charities in England and Wales as reported in the Reports of theCharity Commissioners issued first between 1818 and 1837 and then between

16 Thompson’s article, concluding as it does that the rent from ownership of the soil in England wasless than one quarter of the gross rent, reads suspiciously like a piece of propaganda for the landedinterest. His estimates of repairs and other expenses, if correct, imply a much greater psychic premiumfrom land than Offer estimates.

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1889 and 1912. The Charity Commission examined the histories of the assetholdings of charities in most parishes in England and Wales in the course of itsfirst investigation which lasted from 1818 to 1837. Often the commissioners gavedetails on the purchases and sales of assets such as land, tithes, houses, rentcharges, mortgages, and private bonds. The typical way the details of a transactionwould come to be noted in the Charity Commission reports is that in discussingeach charity the Commissioners noted any details of the original purchase of landor rent charges that they could glean from the documents retained by the charity.They did this because they were concerned about checking that no land had beenlost to the charity over time and that rent charges bought earlier were all still beingpaid. The Charity Commission reports generally give the location of the assetpurchased or sold. Since they were interested in ensuring that charities werebeing used for the purpose specified by the donor they also frequently gave detailsof these wills, including what stipulations donors made as to what the rate ofreturn would be on land and other assets bought with their gift: A personwould, for example, specify in their will of 1621 that they were leaving £100 tobuy land of the current yearly value of at least £5 to be used for bread for thepoor.17

These data are supplemented in the case of returns on land holding byinformation on land sales from the reports of the Royal Commissioners of Woods,Forests, and Land Revenues for 1799 to 1828, from the inventories of thedirectors of the South Sea Company in 1721, and from an article by ChristopherClay.18 Table 1 shows the set of observations available from these sources in eachsubperiod and the types of observation.

In addition to observations on the rate of return from individual transactions wecan estimate the return from land ownership by comparing the average price ofland of given characteristics with the average rent of land with the samecharacteristics in each decade. As can be seen in Table 1 we have copious data forsome periods on land prices and land rents.

How representative are the Charity Commission observations of capital marketconditions in the country as a whole? Might charities, for example, be carelesspurchasers and poor managers of assets so that the returns they achieved werelower than those in the general private market conditions? Since charities asinstitutions presumably did not care about the social prestige to be derived fromland ownership there may also be questions about whether the data derived fromthis source will show the social premium derived from landownership by privateland owners and in particular by the owners of the great landed estates.

The answer to these worries is fourfold:(1) If the land market was reasonably competitive, then charities were bidding

for land against potential private buyers who would give extra value to land as an

17 Clark (1998) describes the nature and quality of the information in the charity commissionreports in greater detail.

18 See the sources to Table 1 and Clay (1974).

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investment as well as selling land to such investors. Thus the prices they paid willreflect this premium.19

(2) Since we have data for some years on returns on land from the estate sectorfrom such sources as Clay (1974) we can test whether the return on charity land inthese periods was any different from that on estate land. We shall see there is nodifference.

(3) Part of the information we get from the Charity Commission reports are thereturns donors to charities expected the land purchased with their donation toyield. We can use these estimated rates of return, presumably derived from thedonors’ experience in the land market, to independently estimate thepsychicpremiumfrom land ownership in the private sector. Again we shall see there is nodifference between the expected returns and the achieved returns.

(4) Charities bought land in all sizes from less than an acre to more than athousand acres. Suppose the psychic premium was attached only to land in estatesized parcels. We can test to see whether the rate of return declines with the parcelsize. Were parcels big enough that the land could be used as a mini-estate or did anestate offer a lower rate of return?20

19 This raises the question of why charities would then buy any land if it earned a lower monetaryreturn than other investments. But charities were often required by the donors to invest the gifts inland, and later many of the transactions we observe are for land sales. As we shall see there is in factlittle evidence of a psychic premium attached to land.

20 Though if this is true it raises the question of why owners of large estates did not split them intosmaller units to sell them.

TABLE 1Composition of Rate of Return Observations

Type Pre1689 1689–1769 1770–1839 1840–1909

Real assetsLand returns

Actual 117 204 202 64Expected 265 133 2 0

Land prices 724 1338 562 718Land rents 577 840 16,424 4896Nominal assetsRent charges

Actual 378 244 124 66Expected 101 52 3 —

Mortgages 9 37 205 113

Source:See Clark (1998).Notes.The number of observations on returns drawn from each source is:

First Charity Commission Reports, 1873; later Charity Commission Reports,300; Crown Estates, 55 (1799–1828); and South Sea Bubble Directors, 100(1715–1721). The expected return under each category are the returns donors tocharities specified they expected their donations to earn invested in the fashionspecified.

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We can illustrate the variation in the size of land purchases by Table 2 whichshows the frequency of each size of purchase, where the size is measured by £,converted into the equivalent purchasing power of 1820–1829. The secondcolumn gives the equivalent size of purchase in terms of acres of standardfarmland that that sum would buy in the decade of the 1820s. The third columnshows the frequency of each size of actual purchase where the rate of return canbe calculated for that particular transaction. The fourth column shows the sameinformation for statements of the expected return on land purchases. The lastcolumn shows the distribution of purchase or sale sizes of all cases in the CharityCommission records where a purchase or sale is recorded.21 As can be seen in allthese cases there is a great range in the size of the transactions.

The information on land purchases in my combined data set is well distributedacross the country in all periods since the Charity Commissioners inquired intocharitable holdings and their origins in almost all the parishes in England andWales in the course of their investigation. Figure 1 shows the distribution of theobservations across England and Wales where the location is known.

4. THE NET RETURN ON FARMLAND

Table 3 shows the calculated average net current rate of return on land for10-year periods between 1600 and 1910 and for 20-year periods for the yearsbefore 1600, with the standard error of the estimate. That is, it shows thecalculated ratio of the rent to the price in percentages. As can be seen the rate ofreturn on holding land first rises slightly from 1540 to 1620, then enters into analmost continuous decline from then till 1900.

This net return on holding land is derived as a weighted average of two series.

21 The money values were converted into the equivalent amount of farmland by use of an index ofrental values of farmland derived from 28,399 observations on plots of land from 1540 to 1912 givenin the Charity Commission reports.

TABLE 2The Distribution of Purchases by Value (£ 1820)

Purchasesize (£, 1820)

Equivalentsize (acres)

Actualreturns

Expectedreturns

Purchaseonly

£0–500 ,5 156 85 1200500–1000 5–13 102 99 617

1000–2000 13–31 92 56 4912000–5000 31–100 122 84 3535000–10,000 100–243 45 22 89

10,000–20,000 243–590 25 25 2820,0001 5901 26 18 11Number 568 389 2789

Source:See Table 1.

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The first, shown in the second column is the gross return on land derived fromcases where we have both the price and the rent of the land, or the price and theexpected rent specified by donors. To make maximal use of the information, Iused both sources to get the 10 yearly estimates of the return on land shown inTable 3. To check that allowing in expected returns does not bias my estimates Ifitted the following regression equation to the data:

RET5 SbtDUMt 1 gDEXP, (1)

FIG. 1. The geographic distribution of observations on the return on land purchases (sources: seetext).

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whereRETis the rate of return on land in percentages. Each of theDUMt is 1 forone of the periods 1560–1579, 1580–1599, 1600–1609, 1610–1619, . . . , and 0otherwise.DEXP is 1 when the rate of return is an expected rather than an actualrate. The estimated value ofg shows how expected returns compared to actualreturns. Observations from 1720 were omitted because it was clear that in the

TABLE 3The Rate of Return from Land Transactions (Percentages)

Period

Individualrates of returnGross returns

Prices versusrents

Gross returns

Weighted average

Gross returns Net returnsa

1560–1579 4.54 (0.32) 5.55 (1.09) 4.62 (0.31) 4.611580–1599 5.32 (0.23) 4.90 (0.73) 5.28 (0.22) 5.271600–1609 5.54 (0.21) 4.92 (0.82) 5.50 (0.20) 5.491610–1619 5.55 (0.18) 5.53 (0.59) 5.55 (0.17) 5.541620–1629 5.39 (0.15) 5.14 (0.47) 5.37 (0.14) 5.361630–1639 5.31 (0.14) 4.90 (0.44) 5.27 (0.13) 5.261640–1649 5.20 (0.18) 5.82 (0.60) 5.25 (0.17) 5.241650–1659 5.20 (0.17) 5.72 (0.49) 5.26 (0.16) 5.251660–1669 5.22 (0.18) 5.35 (0.51) 5.23 (0.17) 5.221670–1679 5.33 (0.16) 4.84 (0.36) 5.25 (0.15) 5.241680–1689 4.99 (0.15) 4.88 (0.38) 4.98 (0.14) 4.971690–1699 5.00 (0.17) 5.13 (0.35) 5.03 (0.15) 4.471700–1709 4.91 (0.14) 4.68 (0.32) 4.87 (0.13) 4.281710–1719 5.04 (0.14) 4.56 (0.31) 4.96 (0.13) 4.471720–1729b 4.64 (0.13) 4.15 (0.25) 4.54 (0.12) 4.181730–1739 4.39 (0.17) 3.91 (0.22) 4.21 (0.14) 3.981740–1749 3.95 (0.24) 3.56 (0.23) 3.75 (0.17) 3.271750–1759 4.55 (0.22) 4.47 (0.30) 4.52 (0.18) 4.161760–1769 4.46 (0.34) 3.88 (0.28) 4.11 (0.21) 3.731770–1779 3.65 (0.30) 3.77 (0.28) 3.71 (0.21) 3.441780–1789 4.07 (0.24) 3.41 (0.22) 3.70 (0.16) 3.361790–1799 3.66 (0.22) 3.19 (0.27) 3.47 (0.17) 3.251800–1809 3.49 (0.15) 3.86 (0.21) 3.61 (0.12) 3.491810–1819 3.53 (0.13) 3.70 (0.19) 3.58 (0.11) 3.491820–1829 3.35 (0.15) 3.60 (0.18) 3.45 (0.12) 3.351830–1839 4.05 (0.18) 2.92 (0.19) 3.51 (0.13) 3.411840–1849 3.81 (0.95) 2.90 (0.32) 3.00 (0.31) 2.871850–1859 2.45 (0.55) 2.89 (0.23) 2.83 (0.21) 2.711860–1869 2.84 (0.27) 3.21 (0.15) 3.12 (0.13) 2.991870–1879 2.59 (0.22) 2.42 (0.11) 2.45 (0.10) 2.351880–1889 2.94 (0.43) 2.74 (0.15) 2.76 (0.14) 2.601890–1899 2.90 (0.24) 3.44 (0.17) 3.26 (0.14) 2.801900–1909 2.98 (0.37) 3.39 (0.21) 3.29 (0.18) 2.83

Source.See the text.Note.Standard errors are in parentheses.a The net return is the gross return minus estimated land tax payments and repairs, plus

timber sales. There were taxes on land before 1690 which are not included in this table.b 1720 observations are omitted.

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EH0689@xyserv2/disk3/CLS_jrnl/GRP_eehj/JOB_eehj97ps/DIV_237z03 donn

period of the South Sea Bubble the return on holding land fell markedly.Seemingly the insiders in the Bubble were rushing to cash out their gains andinvest them in land, driving down the rate of return in that year.

The estimated value ofg, the coefficient measuring the difference betweenexpectations and actual rates of return is20.08%, and the standard error is lowenough that we can say with confidence that peoples’ expectations about rates ofreturn available on real assets recorded in such documents as wills on averagereflected market conditions. Thus these people seem to have had close to correctbeliefs about what rate of return was available from investing in land.

The second column shows the rate of return derived from a very differentmethod. In this column the average rent of land in each decade in the charitycommission records is compared to the average rent, controlling for land charac-teristics. Here we have many more observations, but the process is noisier, so theresulting return estimates are about as noisy as those in column 1. The averagereturn by decade in the second column is 4.17%, which is within 3% of theaverage return of 4.29% in the first column. To get my best estimate of returns,which is column three, I form a weighted average of the first two columns wherethe weights are the inverse of the standard errors of the estimates in each columnsquared.22 This means that for the years before 1720 the directly estimated returnshave the predominant weight in the combined series, while for the years after1840 the indirectly estimated returns predominate. For all periods except the yearsbefore 1580 and the decade of the 1840s the resulting estimate of the gross returnon land is accurate to at least 0.5% in each direction with 95% confidence.

We can compare the gross return on charity land with that on private estates asmeasured by Clay (1974), Norton, Trist, and Gilbert (1962), and Ward as reportedby Offer (1991). This is shown in Fig. 2. As can be seen the returns on the charityland follow pretty closely to those on other estates until at least the 1830s, whenthe charity returns are generally lower. For the years where the charity returnsoverlap with Clay’s, for example, the average return between the two series differsby only 0.07%.

The last column of Table 3 shows the average net return on land, adding inestimated earnings from timber sales, and deducting land tax payments andrepairs paid for by owners. The British government from 1692 on derived a largepart of its revenue from a tax on land. This tax was originally supposed to apply toall property, so that income from mortgages, bond lending, and rent charges

22 The means in column three were calculated from the formula

se22

se12 1 se2

2µ1 1

se12

se12 1 se2

2µ2,

where these’s are the standard errors and the µ’s the estimated means. In a similar way the standarderror of the combined estimate is calculated as:

Î se12 se2

2

se12 1 se2

2.

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would be equally affected. The tax soon came to be called the land tax, however,since this was the asset it was effectively levied upon. The tax should thus havepushed up the rent/price ratio on land relative to the return on other assets. The taxwas levied based on a valuation of the market rental value of land, but the assessedvalues were often below the actual values. Later the tax became fossilized at theparish level as a fixed assessment, so that when rents rose in the late 18th centurythe average assessed value of land for tax purposes became a much smallerpercentage of the rental value. Because of this fossilization it is possible to derivean estimate of the effect of the tax on the charity holdings in all the years since1690 by comparing the market value of land circa 1700 with later land taxpayments. This comparison suggests that land tax assessments for the charity landwere initially on average only 63% of the market values of land, so that theeffective tax rate was initially only 11% of land rents, falling by the late 19thcentury to less than 3%.23

The charity commission records give indication of the extra income fromtimber sales and the losses from repairs. For a sample of 5350 cases for the 1810sand 1820s I collected information on all reported income from timber sales in thefive years before the Charity Commissioners examined the managers of theland.24 In 7.4% of cases money was earned from timber sales, and overall the

23 See Clark (1997).24 This short window was chosen so that there would be little chance of the sale escaping attention.

After about 10 years the number of reported timber sales drops off sharply, showing that many of the

FIG. 2. Comparative gross returns on land purchases (sources: Clay, 1974; Norton, Trist, andGilbert, 1962; Offer, 1991).

72 GREGORY CLARK


average annual income from timber sales was 1.1% of the tenant’s rental payment.A similar sample of cases from 1889 to 1910 shows average timber earnings bythen to have fallen to a scant 0.2% of rental payments.

A similar sampling of repair expenditures shows the following pattern inaverage recorded repair expenditures, as a percentage of rents:

1819–1827 1889–1910

Land with buildings 4.6% 10.2%Land without buildings 0.2% 1.0%Overall 1.3% 3.5%

The repair expenditures are surprisingly small given that Allen assumed thatadministrative costs before 1815 were in the order of 20% of rents, and Offerassumes them to be 25% of rents post-1790. However, in the earlier period repairswere often the responsibility of the tenant. Thus in the 1820s the tenant undertookrepairs in 40% of the cases where it is stated. By the 1890s, the tenant repaired inonly 9% of cases. Further, on land without buildings, which constituted 76% ofthe charity land, repair costs were generally limited to replacing gates and were asshown a very small fraction of rents. On land with buildings the repair costsshown for the 1889–1910 period, when almost all repairs were done by thelandlord, are in line with other evidence in the Charity Commission reports. Thusa surveyor valued two farms in 1803 on the basis that repairs would be 7.5% ofrents.25

The combined effect of timber and repairs on the realized net rents is thus todepress these by a mere 0.2% in the years before 1837, but by 3.3% in the yearsafter 1880. For the intermediate decades I reduce gross rents by the average ofthese two rates.

5. THE RETURN ON ALTERNATIVE ASSETS

For rent charges we again have two types of observation, the rate of return andthe expected rate of return. Table 4 shows the average net return on rent chargescombining these sources by 10-year periods. In the years after 1692 in some, butonly some, cases the rent charge would be paid with land tax deducted. The netreturn is thus calculated by subtracting the amount of land tax paid at the time ofthe purchase of the rent charge. Again I test that the aggregation induces nodistortions by estimating the regression,

RET5 SbtDUMt 1 gDEXP, (2)

where each of theDUMt is 1 for one of the periods 1560–1579, 1580–1599, andby decade thereafter, and 0 otherwise.DEXP is defined as in the real asset

earlier sales are not reported. The actual window used was 4.5 years, the current year being counted asa half since on average the year would only be half over at the time of the inspection.

25 Charity Commission Report, Volume 17, p. 491.

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regression. The estimated value ofg is 0.06%, and again the standard error is lowenough that we can say with confidence that expected and actual returns werevery similar in each period.26 This implies that again that expectations about ratesof return available for rent charges or annuities recorded in such documents as

26 The standard error ofg is 0.083.

TABLE 4The Rate of Return on Other Assets (Percentages)

PeriodRent charges(net return) Mortgages Consols

LandPremiuma

1560–1579 5.12 (0.24) 111580–1599 5.89 (0.19) 151600–1609 6.07 (0.17) 101610–1619 5.90 (0.14) 101620–1629 6.28 (0.13) 141630–1639 5.85 (0.13) 181640–1649 5.62 (0.17) 81650–1659 5.58 (0.13) 61660–1669 5.37 (0.12) 71670–1679 5.48 (0.10) 101680–1689 5.24 (0.14) 5.00 (0.52) 81690–1699 4.82 (0.14) 5.32 (0.41) 151700–1709 4.57 (0.13) 5.00 (0.52) 141710–1719 4.83 (0.14) 5.00 (0.64) 151720–1729 4.36 (0.15) 5.00 (0.52) 171730–1739 4.13 (0.15) 4.67 (0.37) 3.03 121740–1749 4.14 (0.19) 4.28 (0.37) 3.25 241750–1759 4.25 (0.18) 4.25 (0.37) 3.15 91760–1769 4.03 (0.27) 4.58 (0.37) 3.60 161770–1779 4.15 (0.24) 4.28 (0.30) 3.91 171780–1789 3.87 (0.22) 4.45 (0.29) 4.61 161790–1799 4.10 (0.21) 4.77 (0.17) 4.54 191800–1809 4.23 (0.21) 4.93 (0.24) 4.80 171810–1819 4.35 (0.15) 4.91 (0.14) 4.57 241820–1829 4.41 (0.24) 4.77 (0.11) 3.72 271830–1839 4.85 (0.41) 4.60 (0.15) 3.40 271840–1849 4.28 (0.38) 4.00 (0.91) 3.26 361850–1859 4.04 (0.53) 4.50 (0.34) 3.16 341860–1869 4.27b (0.53) 4.56 (0.32) 3.27 32b

1870–1879 3.94b (0.22) 4.64 (0.23) 3.19 27b

1880–1889 4.21b (0.24) 4.37 (0.18) 2.97 28b

1890–1899 3.69b (0.18) 3.93 (0.13) 2.47 22b

1900–1909 3.77b (0.35) 4.00 (0.37) 2.79 12b

Sources:See text.a The land premium is calculated as a percentage from the net return on land in Table 3

compared to the net return on rent charges.b The reported return on rent charges in these years is the upper bound of rent charge

returns. See the text for an explanation.

74 GREGORY CLARK


wills were not biased. Figure 3 shows the net return on land compared to the netreturn on rent charges. As can be seen the series move closely together but in alldecades the return on rent charges exceeds that on land. The average difference inreturns is 0.4% in the years before 1800, but the difference increases to more than1% thereafter.

There is a difficulty with the rent charge series after 1860. The returns reportedhere represent the returns on purchases of rent charges by charities in these years.At the same time rent charges owned by charities were sometimes redeemed byowners in the years after 1860, but the Charity Commission insisted that suchredemptions be done by the purchase of a quantity of consols for the charity whichwould yield the same rent. The implied return on these redemptions was thus theconsol return rate shown in column 3. These observations on rent charge returnswere not included because they do not necessarily represent the average marketrate of return on rent charges. But since the two rates differ substantially, the trueaverage market rate may well be lower than that reported and consequently theland premium exaggerated.

Table 4 also shows the return on mortgages and ‘‘consols’’ by decade. Themortgage rates are again derived from the charity commission reports. Mortgagerates are higher than rent charge rates in most decades, reflecting the differentcharacter of the mortgage. The ‘‘consol’’ rate is the rate for 3% annuities before1752, for 3% consols from then till 1887, and for 2.5% consols thereafter.

Table 4 finally shows the premium paid for a £1 of net rent from land comparedto a £1 of net rent from a rent charge. This premium is illustrated in Fig. 4, which

FIG. 3. Net return on land, rent charges and consols (%), 1560–1909 (sources: Tables 3 and 4).

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shows the raw ‘‘psychic’’ premium paid for land in percentage terms,F, assumingfor the moment that there are no capital gains. This is the best measure of theextent to which people paid extra for income from land. The raw land premium issmall and relatively constant from 1560 to 1800 (a period of 240 years), averaging9%. But in the early 19th century land purchasers began to pay a more substantialamount extra to get income from land, and the average premium thereafter is29%. There were, however, periods of substantial capital gains on the landmarket. Overall between 1560 and 1909 nominal land rents rose at an averageannual rate of 0.69% per year. Figure 4 shows the estimated average rent of landby decade between 1560 and 1910. As can be seen there are two periods of rapidrent growth, 1560–1620 and 1790–1810, and a period of large rent declinesbetween 1875 and 1895. The psychic premium on land where there are capitalgains is given by

F 5rC 2 rL 2 r

rC,

wherer is the rate of growth of land rents. Since the average excess return fromrent charges was 0.69%, on average an investor in land earned exactly the sameamount investing in land as they would have if investing in rent charges over these300 years. To a first approximation land and rent charges yielded the sameamount. Investors paid no physic premium to invest in land.

Is there, however, any evidence that future capital gains were anticipated byinvestors? Suppose people predicted future rent gains on land from the experience

FIG. 4. The land premium without capital gains, 1560–1909 (sources: Tables 3 and 4).

76 GREGORY CLARK


of the past 10 years. If this was the case, then the difference between currentreturns on land and on rent charges should have widened in periods after rapidgrowth of land rents. However, if we estimate the relationship

DRET5 a 1 bGRENT,

whereDRETis the difference in returns, andGRENTis the annual growth rate ofland rents over the past 10 years, the estimated value ofb is 20.05, implying thatthe return difference if anything narrowed immediately after the experience ofcapital gains. Thus there is no sign that people mechanistically updated theirexpectations of rent movements based on recent experiences. If, however, wegraph also on Fig. 5 the difference in current returns on rent charges versus land,we do see that there is a possibility that the rent inflations of 1540–1620 and1760–1815 both created generalized expectations of further possible rent in-creases and so bid up land prices relative to rent charges for a long period. Giventhe limitations of the data the best we can say is that between 1560 and 1909 thosewho invested in land in England compared to rent charges on average earned thesame amount.

If we calculate the premium earned from investing in mortgages compared toland we find a more substantial raw premium, which averages 24% from 1680 to1910 (compared to 15% for rent charges). The mortgage premium again rises inthe 19th century. This premium is shown between 1680 and 1910 in Fig. 4. Sinceeconomic historians such as Allen, Clay, and Habakkuk took the mortgage as the

FIG. 5. Land rents and the difference in returns between rent charges and land, 1560–1909(source: see text).

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alternative investment to land, they thus saw the apparent psychic premium frompurchasing land as much higher than it actually was in the years before 1800,because mortgages yielded a significantly higher return than rent charges.

When we compare returns on land versus consols from 1730 to 1910 we findthat here the average premium from investing in consols was even smaller,averaging only 7%. This premium is shown in Fig. 6. The premium also jumpedaround a lot, varying from232% to128%, being particularly high in the years1780 to 1820 which were mainly ones of war and heavy government borrowing.Thus some of the return premium of consols in these years may stem from aperceived default risk in these war years, rather than the social benefits from landownership. If we compare this premium with that implied by Offer’s (1991)numbers, as done in Fig. 6, we see that the two series are broadly similar, thoughOffer’s calculated premium is higher for the years before 1830. Offer uses theconsol premium to explain the transition of English farming by the late 19thcentury into a largely tenant based system, where 90% of those working the landdid not own it. Yet the transition to tenant farming had mostly taken place by thelate 18th century, and we see that for most of that century consols or theirequivalent offered a lower immediate return than did land. And all the way from1560 to 1800 there is at best a very modest premium paid for ownership of landcompared to rent charges. Thus the major period of transition to tenant farmingundoubtedly occurred in an era when land was not yielding much psychic returnto the marginal purchasers.

FIG. 6. The psychic premium against consols, 1730–1909 (sources: Tables 3 and 4 and Offer,1991).

78 GREGORY CLARK


6. MARKET SEGMENTATION

While the premium paid for land in general in preindustrial England was eithernonexistent, or at best fairly modest, was there a more significant premium forparticular types of land: land in large estates or land in the countryside close to thecenters of population?

I can use the data from the Charity Commission reports to measure if there isany evidence in favor of the first notion that the return on different types of landvaried. Some of the land purchased by charities was in big enough pieces that itwas in the estate category. More than 70 of the purchases, for example, were ofblocks of land equivalent to more than 500 acres of farmland, which wouldqualify as at least a small estate. To test whether the purchasers of larger blocks ofland paid more per unit of rent I modify Eq. (1) above to

ln(RET) 5 SbtDUMt 1 h ln(AREA). (3)

If large estates were bought for prestige purposes, and somehow this was asegmented area of the market, thenh will be estimated as negative. The estimatedvalue of the coefficienth measuring the effect of the size of the land purchase onreturns is however only20.00246 and is statistically insignificantly differentfrom 0. This estimated coefficient implies that a piece of land with an area of 1000acres would give 98.3% of the return of a piece of land of 1 acre. Thus there is nosign that larger parcels of land offered a lower rate of return. There is no clearsegmentation of the market into an ‘‘economic’’ portion on small plots and farmsand a ‘‘prestige’’ sector encompassing larger farms and collections of farms.

We can also look for scale effects by comparing what happens to land rents asplot size increases with what happens to land prices as plot size increases, usingthe data on about 23,000 plot rents and 2600 land prices from the CharityCommission. Again the answer we get is that the ratio of rents to prices staysroughly constant as we move from plots of 1 acre to those of 1000 acres.

The second test that I can perform here of the view that many estates werebought for their ‘‘psychic’’ returns in part is to look at the return on property as afunction of its distance from London. London was the great financial, commer-cial, and administrative center of England and Wales even in the 16th century.Consequently many wealthy people either conducted their business there orneeded to be in London frequently on business, administrative, and social matters.

The difficulty of travel throughout most of the period from 1540 to 1825 meantthat for those of the wealthy who wanted a country estate for social purposes thecloser the estate was to London the more convenient it would be. Illustrating thisdifficulty is the fact that Queen Elizabeth I in the whole 45 years of her reign neverjourneyed further north than Derby or further west than Bristol.27 The high costsof travel would imply that if land was bought forpsychicreturns that requiredvisiting the land periodically, or residing upon it, then the prices of estates close toLondon would be bid up relative to their money rents compared to more remote

27 Sinclair (1984, p. 15).

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properties. To test this I estimated Eq. (1) again, for the years before 1750 and theyears after 1750, but with a variable measuring the distance of each piece of landfrom London in kilometers (or in the case of expected rates of return the distanceof the expector from London). I also estimated the same expression using rentcharges instead of land returns. The estimated coefficients on distance fromLondon were as follows (with the standard error of the estimate in parentheses, *indicating that the coefficient is significantly different from zero at the 5% level,and ** indicating that it is significantly different at the 1% level).

Land returns Rent charge returns

1560–1749 0.083* 0.100**(.034) (.031)

1750–1909 0.042 0.184**(.073) (.048)

The estimated coefficient on distance from London on land returns before 1750 ispositive and statistically significant at the 5% level. The calculated effect is thatfor each 100 km we move from London the current return on land ownership risesby 0.083%. This implies that rates of return in the very north of England would beabout 0.4% higher than those in London. But the same effect is found for rentcharges. The magnitude of this effect is very similar as for land in the earlierperiod, and it implies that the effect on returns on land of distance from Londonwas not a result of thepsychicbenefits of land ownership, but of a lack ofcomplete integration of regional capital markets.

7. CONCLUSIONS

The various explorations conducted above of the return on holding land andrent charges between 1560 and 1909 all suggest one thing. Thepsychicbenefitssome owners derived from the possession of farmland did not drive the return onfarmland much below the return on comparable assets, except perhaps for theyears after 1800. The landed classes did not have to choose between owning landand maximizing their economic position. There was enough land that while somepurchasers may have derived psychic benefits from owning land, there weremany, large and small, who bought land purely as an economic proposition.

Interestingly there is evidence that this conclusion also applies to England inthe Middle Ages. Marx believed that the late 15th and early 16th centuries saw atransition in England between a society where land was sought because it broughtdependent tenants who would be the power base for the estate owner and onewhere land was sought for the ‘‘capitalist’’ motive of money income.28 Theevidence for the period after 1560 is quite consistent with Marx’s views of the‘‘capitalist’’ nature of agriculture by this time. But in this same view there shouldbe a rise in the rate of return on land relative to rent charges between 1300 and

28 Marx (1977, pp. 877–883).

80 GREGORY CLARK


1560. In an earlier article I calculated that the average rate of return on rentcharges in the 13th century was 10.25%. Bean reports for land that ‘‘In the middleof the thirteenth century the current rate of purchase was ten years’ annualvalue.’’29 Thus land yielded just slightly less than rent charges, as was the case formost of the period from 1560 to 1800. Hence, there is no sign of the transition thatMarx posited in motives for land holding. There is no sign before the IndustrialRevolution of anyone ever paying much ‘‘psychic premium’’ for land. In thisrespect then England even in the Middle Ages appears very different from India orEastern Europe even in the 20th century.

The one mystery in these calculations is the apparent premium that was paid forland in the 19th century. This shows very strongly when land is compared to rentcharges, even though from 1800 to 1909 there is almost no increase in land rents.As was noted above there are, however, difficulties with the quantity and qualityof the information on rent charge returns in these years. As before, this apparentpremium attached to large and small plots and to land close to London and farfrom London. Whatever was driving people to pay more for land than rent chargeswas driving the smallholders as much as the aristocrats. But while the rent chargereturns suggest a premium, the returns on consols after the end of the Napoleonicwars suggest little extra income was gained by investing in government consols,on average only 3% between 1820 and 1909. Further on both my numbers andOffer’s the premium dissappears quickly in the period 1890–1910. Why wouldthe social prestige attached to land disappear quickly in these decades? It is muchmore plausible that the rent deflations of the years 1875–1895 eliminatedexpectations of capital gains from land and even created expectations of capitallosses. Evidence thus exists for a psychic premium paid for land in the 19thcentury, but the case is still open.

REFERENCES

Allen, Robert C. (1988), ‘‘The Price of Freehold Land and the Interest Rate in the Seventeenth andEighteenth Centuries.’’Economic History Review, 2nd ser.XLI, 33–50.

Bean, J. M. W. (1991), ‘‘Landlords.’’ In Edward Miller (Ed.),The Agrarian History of England andWales, Vol. III, 1348–1500.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. pp. 526–586.

Beckett, J. V. (1984), ‘‘The Pattern of Landownership in England and Wales.’’Economic HistoryReview, 2nd ser.XXXVII, 1–22.

Campbell, Mildred (1942),The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts.New Haven,CT: Yale Univ. Press.

Cheshire, G. C. (1962),The Modern Law of Real Property, 9th ed.London: Butterworth.Clark, Gregory (1988), ‘‘The Cost of Capital and Medieval Agricultural Technique.’’Explorations in

Economic History25,265–294.Clark, Gregory (1997), ‘‘A Revolution Too Many: The Agricultural Revolution, 1700–1850.’’

Agricultural History Center, University of California, Davis, Working Paper #91.Clark, Gregory (1998), ‘‘The Reports of the Charity Commission as a Source in Economic History.’’

Research in Economic History,Vol. 18, in press.

29 Clark (1988), Table 3, p. 273 and Bean (1991, p. 567).

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Clay, Christopher (1974), ‘‘The Price of Freehold Land in the Later Seventeenth and EighteenthCenturies.’’Economic History Review, 2nd ser.XXVII, 173–189.

Clay, Christopher (1984a),Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700.Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Vol. I.

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Habakkuk, H. J. (1952), ‘‘The Long-Term Rate of Interest and the Price of Land in the SeventeenthCentury.’’Economic History Review, 2nd ser.V, 26–45.

Habakkuk, H. J. (1960), ‘‘The English Land Market in the Eighteenth Century.’’ In J. S. Bromely andE. H. Kossman (Eds.),Britain and the Netherlands.London: Chatto and Windus.

Habakkuk, H. J. (1994),Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650–1950.Oxford: Clarendon.

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Macfarlane, Alan (1978),The Origins of English Individualism.Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Marx, Karl (1977),Capital.New York: Random House. Vol. I.Narain, Raj (1932),An Economic Survey of Gijhi.Punjab: Board of Economic Inquiry.Norton, Trist, and Gilbert (1962), ‘‘A Century of Land Values: England and Wales.’’ In E. Carus-

Wilson (Ed.),Essays in Economic History, III.New York: St. Martin’s Press. pp. 128–131.Offer, Avner (1991), ‘‘Farm Tenure and Land Values in England, c. 1750–1950.’’Economic History

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Edward I.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.Sinclair, Andrew (1984),Sir Walter Raleigh and the Age of Discovery.Harmondsworth: Penguin.Spufford, Margaret (1974),Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seven-

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the Nineteenth Century.’’Journal of the Royal Statistical SocietyLXX, 587–625.Warriner, Doreen (1939),Economics of Peasant Farming.London: Oxford Univ. Press.

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Documents

Land Hunger: Land as a Commodity and as a Status Good, England, 1500–1910