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That many of the tacksmen, rather than comply with exorbitant demands, had gone off to America, and impoverished the country, by draining it of its wealth; and that their places were filled by a number of poor people, who had lived under them, properly speaking, as servants, paid by a certain proportion of the produce of the lands, though called sub-tenants.
A great deal of it was held by military service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be either a layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this military service to the king, while the sub-tenants had to render it to the tenants-in-chief.
It has been asserted that the relation of the tenant to the landlord who lets his estate in large lots to tenants, who again have their sub-tenants, and sub-sub-tenants, in turn, so that often ten middlemen come between the landlord and the actual cultivator it has been asserted that the shameful law which gives the landlord the right of expropriating the cultivator who may have paid his rent duly, if the first tenant fails to pay the landlord, that this law is to blame for all this poverty.
Like the feudal sub-tenants these free-holders are, for most purposes, subject to the jurisdiction of their lord; though in the well organised state the royal judges protect them against the grosser forms of violence.
Then the conflagration which had occurred a few days later, and the subsequent discovery among the debris of a body, charred and stabbed; the apparent ignorance of everybody as to whose body it was; the statement made by the police that none knew the names of the sub-tenants who had occupied that house when the fire had broken out, or what had since become of them the actual tenant was in America.
Apparently nobody occupied the house when the fire broke out, the sub-tenants, whose identity is veiled in obscurity, having left some days previously. "Have you read the account in your paper?" I asked, turning to Dulcie as I put mine down. "Yes," she answered, "I have just finished it. Isn't it terrible?" "I have a theory," a boy's voice exclaimed suddenly.
As an instance of the extraordinary ignorance of the laws, in which the commissioners venture to propose amendments, and of the negligence with which the report is drawn up, we quote the following passage from the report: "By the present practice, when a mesne lessee exercises his power of redeeming under an ejectment for rent, the landlord may be required to give up the land to him, without any occupiers upon it; and it is suggested that cases have occurred in which a mesne tenant has permitted, or even encouraged, a process of ejectment against himself, in order to throw upon the landlord the unpleasant task of removing a number of sub-tenants, so that he himself might, upon redeeming, obtain entire possession of the land.
He had ten sub-tenants, was reported to make £500 per annum from mill and farm, and though he had removed part of his stock, there were still cattle on the land on the day of eviction enough to cover two years' arrears. If he had paid even those two years on account he would have received an abatement, and saved his farm.
However, Milner built an additional large dining-room at his own expense, and it being finished all but the chimney-top, he got up one summer morning very early, ordered his men and horses along with a mason to follow him, and went to William Laing, one of his sub-tenants, of whom he had a host, quietly removed a new dressed granite chimney-top which Laing had lately erected, without being detected by the inmates, and had it placed upon his room ere ever it was missed.
Obviously, when the King's scutage had to be levied, there was no telling who was liable for it, or how it should be apportioned. There was a capital mansion in which the lord resided, or was supposed to reside, and sub-tenants holding their land under the lord, and paying to him periodically certain small money rents and rendering him certain services.
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