Origin of Rent
The want of intelligent workmen, without the concurrence of other causes, might have destroyed the old English predial polity, if that system had not failed through its own nature; having been essentially rude and awkward and uncommercial. Under the Plantagenets, service could in general be reduced to money at the discretion of the lord or the option of the tenant. The service often cost the tenant more than it was worth—he found it cheaper to pay than to work: on the other hand, money must have been at all times welcome to the lord, and he did not at all times require labour. In the course of time agricultural service went out of use altogether, and money was regularly tendered and accepted instead of it: so that the improved rent, as it has been called, now paid by a farmer, appears to be a compound—historically considered—of the ancient mail or gable, and of a great variety of petty charges, which were originally compensations for tributes of corn, malt, poultry, bacon, and eggs—or fines for the non-performance of acts of tillage, carriage, porterage, and the like. The elements of rent were recognised in Scotland longer than in England, because petty charges subsisted in Scotland for some time after they had been abandoned in England. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, David Deans—the tough true-blue Presbyterian farmer—still paid “mail duties, kain, arriage, carriage, dry multure, lock, gowpen, and knaveship, and all the various exactions now commuted for money, and summed up in the emphatic word Rent.”—Heart of Mid-Lothian, chap. viii.; Law Magazine, N. S., No. 27.