6 - Constructing the rent index II: government inquiries

Summary

Until the nineteenth century the movement of rent was of little or no direct interest to government. This situation changed only when the incidence of agricultural depression raised questions to which answers were sought by a more systematic analysis than had previously been attempted. It was when the landlords' incomes came under the most severe threats that Parliament mounted large-scale inquiries and looked seriously at the agricultural base of the economy. In the course of the nineteenth century this happened on two occasions: first, in the agricultural depression which came in the two decades after Waterloo; and second, and more intently, during the agricultural depression which set in during the late 1870s and arguably did not recede until the First World War. These inquiries, particularly the 1890s Royal Commission and a series of private surveys carried out in relation to it, offer us a core of material which we can use in constructing a database.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars there was a period of over two decades of inflationary price movements in Britain. It was caused by a number of factors, not least the wars, but it was also due to a scarcity of food. This was related to successions of harvest deficits and also to problems over external supply. Then in 1797 there were mounting fears of a French invasion. This provoked a run on the country banks by people wanting to redeem their bank notes for gold coins.