the estate groaned under at the time of the bankruptcy. It must be remembered that before the bankruptcy the actual income enjoyed by Lord A was only a little over one quarter of the nominal £16,000 a year, so heavily was the estate already encumbered.
It is the effect of such a situation upon the tenants which makes the story worth telling. How would they fare when the rent, instead of being paid to a man who had an owner's interest in the land, went to creditors, whose only interest was to get their money back as quickly as possible? As long as Lord A and his son lived—probably for a whole generation—the land lay at the mercy of men who, already long kept out of their money, would grudge every penny spent on improvements. It was to the interest of the creditors to repay themselves before the son of Lord B should come of age and make a new settlement. We may be sure that the creditors would not spend a farthing more than they could help on improving the estate for Lord B's son. The repair and erection of farmhouses and cottages, the drainage of the land, and everything else which under ordinary circumstances is done by a landlord, would be neglected. Woods would be cut down for timber, with no regard to the future. At the same time, rents would be kept as high as possible. Everyone who knows anything of the condition of a "sequestered" estate knows that a landlord cannot be beggared without his estate being starved. The whole position is a false one. It is bad for all parties—for the A family, whose estate has become a millstone tied to their necks, for the creditors, who must wait through a long term of years to recover their debts, and for the tenants, who see their holdings gradually deteriorating for want of money to be laid out, and have to choose between rubbing on as they can and having their rent raised to make up for any outlay on improvements. The deterioration of land, when a landlord either could not or would not spend money on necessary improvements, was so great and so obvious, that Parliament attempted more than once to give the Land Commissioners power to charge "settled property" with money spent on improvements, such as drainage and the building of farmhouses and cottages; but in practice this involved such expensive proceedings before the Courts of Law and the Enclosure
