but because I think one is more wanted and can do more for the public interest at the Board than at the Bench, which is here well supplied with Magistrates, and where the business is usually of a very trifling character and grave offences are quite rare. But to business, which always begins here with military punctuality.
First we have a circular letter from a Yorkshire Union inviting our attention and support to a petition on the difficult question of the rating of woodlands. How difficult only those know who have gone into it, as I have, but however unfair and obsolete in many cases the system may be, we can see no use in meddling with it as long as the Royal Commission on Rating is sitting, and the letter is voted “to lie on the table.” Then the appeals come on, mostly reductions or slight alterations in the value of land which after twenty years of depression still seems to keep falling in value. Two farms, both quite near the town, containing a large propor¬ tion of good grass, some of which if subdivided and let as accommodation land would make two or three pounds ail acre, are newly let to young men who look as if they meant business, and show that they well understand the difference between paying rates in a rural parish where they are low and in an urban parish where they are high. The principal difficulty is in arranging the proportionate reduction to be made on the parts of the farms which lie in different parishes about which their respective over¬ seers do not quite agree, but we do our best to reconcile these con¬ flicting interests as fairly as possible, and after a humble lunch of bread, cheese and beer in the boardroom separate to our respective avocations.
Mine is to go to London and settle about the enfranchisement of some copyhold land in Essex, the trustee of which has recently died, and on which a fine is claimed by the lord of the manor. It seems marvellous that such mediæval systems of tenure can have survived to the twentieth century in a country like England. One would suppose that the system, like so many other things in this country, had been originally devised in the interests of the lawyers, who still hold so many interests tied and bound in the net of more or less obsolete legal technicalities. On going into the matter with my solicitor, he quite agrees with me that the land in question, which consists of only a few acres scattered about a property of over seven hundred acres, should be enfranchised whatever it costs, and he tells me I shall be lucky if I get out of it under four hundred pounds. The matter can now be carried out and a legal title given through the Board of Agriculture, but as the lord of the manor is willing to accept as sole valuer a most capable and upright man whom I know and trust thoroughly, we think it may be managed at less expense privately. This is the first and I hope it will be the last time I have to enfranchise a copyhold, and if one could only find some similar means of redeeming tithes, which still hang round the necks of owners of land like a millstone, it would give a great impulse to many improvements in agriculture.
Next I have to go down to meet a man from Lancashire who is looking for a cheap grazing farm in Essex. It is curious that almost invariably during the last few years all the men who come to look at farms are from
