Between lord and tenant

Summary

Gentlemen must be kind and abate rents and give leave to plough or else it will be worse for landlord and tenant.

Francis Guybon, 1708

I assure you, my lord, several tenants in these parts keep landlords in a kind of awe for fear they should throw up their land, so the world is thrown upside down since I knew Croxall.

Charles Agard, 1674

Such ungrateful people as these no persons can oblige for condescensions whet their litigious appetites, never to be satisfied or quieted until they fall into their primitive dust.

Thomas Tickell, 1677

However varied a steward's duties and functions might be his chief concerns, his day-to-day tasks, related to his master's tenants and to those parts of the master's estate which they rented or leased. These properties were predominantly farms but could also be additional pastures, rabbit warrens, fishing rights, houses, or such industrial undertakings as flour or fulling mills, mines or quarries. Everything that the steward did, every action performed, every policy pursued or solution devised, should ideally have helped to secure one fundamental objective: the prosperity of the estate and thereby of his master, his family and his posterity. The surest way to achieve this was by promoting harmony between landlord and tenant, playing a mediating role. To have a disaffected tenantry, involved in outright confrontation and full of bitterness and hostility toward the landlord, could only obstruct his achieving that objective.