Soil 8z tribulation
LORD EGREMONT
The Landowners Douglas Sutherland (Anthony Blond 50s) This is a generic book about landowning m Britain. I am not crazy about generic books. ere are landowners and landowners. Some I my best friends are landowners. Where will 'he now of generic books end? 'The Tinkers'? e Tailors'? 'The Soldiers'? 'The Sailors'? at. I only ask so that I may bring up the ,eirguard in good time with my definitive agnum opus 'Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All.' Mr Sutherland has taken 180 pages to tell what most of us knew already—that land a commodity worth hanging on to if you
n afford it. But he has done it as competently one might hope of this sort of journalistic Iterprise.
Who owns Britain? In the eighteenth cen- ry the Duke of Buckingham could travel am Stowe to Charing Cross without setting not off his own land. Those who succeeded
no doubt keen to keep up the image, hatever that may have been, ruined them- Ives. The place is now a school and the road public highway.
Mr Sutherland goes into all this. But the umber of acres you own is not always the nt. Thousands of acres in Scotland are not rth as much as a few in London. Mr utherland might have quoted Mr Belloc: 'Sir Anthony Habberton, Justice and Knight, Was enfeoffed of two acres of land And it doesn't sound much Till you hear that the site Was a strip to the South of the Strand.'
Nevertheless, as Mr Sutherland says, to own nd in the past was the very cornerstone of wer. Arthur Young, the great protagonist the enclosures and a leader in the agricul- ral revolution, was indignant at the failure the landlords to claim a realistic rent for eir attts—because they wanted to earn, as r Sutherland quotes. 'the extra-low bow and rape:- from the tenants and engage their Anchise.'
Thomas Stone, another agricultural expert f thine times, went so far as to declare (1785) at the absentee landlord with expensive tot to provide for was a benefactor to his tales. 'The extravagant son of White's was
worth ten times more to his country than the gentleman of regulation and moderation; his rents fly with the dice; down he comes into the country and raises to the utmost. No farmers will agree for a rent that they cannot pay . . . the consequence is that his estate is let at its highest value; this is but another word for good husbandry, for that which is bad will not pay great rents.'
How have the landowners managed? Very much, according to Mr Sutherland, by flair in the marriage market. But they also had at the right time a flair for land management. Take Coke of Norfolk, for example. Before Coke's day, Mr Sutherland recalls, it was said that there were two rabbits fighting forevery blade of grass at Holkham. By the time he died his tenants were amongst the most prosperous in England.
Some landowners went up and others came down. Mr Sutherland says that at the end of the eighteenth century Lord Frazer of Kirkhill came upon the Earl of Traquair, a cousin of James VI, of Scotland, begging in the streets of Edinburgh.
Nowadays land values soar. And the future of the landowner? Well, Mr Sutherland doesn't know and neither do I.
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