Every year millions of pounds passed from English tenant farmers to their landlords in the form of rent, but perhaps because it was a financial transaction it took place in some secrecy. The result was that contemporaries were not particularly well informed about rent levels, hence the problems encountered by the Board of Agriculture reporters when, set to produce information on rents, they either failed altogether or ended up with mainly meaningless comments which are of little value to a quantitative study. As a consequence, information on rents only started to become available on a significant scale in the course of the nineteenth century in conjunction with inquiries into the state of agriculture, and more fully and finally only in the twentieth century as estate records have become available to research scrutiny. Arthur Young, James Caird, and other contemporaries who took a close interest in the subject, would be astonished at just how much more we know today about rents paid by their contemporaries than they themselves understood.

Ironically, the flood of information which has become available has, in some ways, complicated rather than simplified the task. Until now historians have sought, in one form or another, to provide rough guides to the course of rents (chapter 3). To produce a definitive index it was necessary to go further: the pitfalls of generalising from the particular to the general – given that English agricultural land has so much variety in its nature and use – had to be avoided.