EGYPTIAN LANDLORDISM.
Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new?
It hath been already of old time which was before us.—ECCLES.
Landlordism, or the territorial system, which gives, generally throughout
a country, the ownership of the land to one class, and the cultivation
of it to another, who pay rent for it, is often spoken of as something
peculiarly English. We hear it said that this divorce of ownership
from cultivation is unnatural. That it is bad economically, and worse
politically. That attachment to the land, the great element of stability
in political institutions, hardly exists under it. On the other side
it is urged that it is a great advantage to a community to possess in
its bosom a large class, far removed from the necessity of working for
its support, which is, therefore, better able to set to other classes
an example of refinement, and of honourable bearing; and of which many
members will naturally desire to devote themselves to the service of
the state, and of their respective neighbourhoods. We argue the point,
as if the landlordism of England were almost something _sui generis_.
This is a mistake. The same system was developed, only more designedly
and methodically, throughout Egypt more than three thousand years ago.
There the whole acreage of the country was divided into rectangular
estates. One third of these was assigned to the king, and the remaining
two thirds, in equal proportions, to the priestly, and to the military
castes. These estates were generally cultivated by another order of men,
who, for the use of the land, paid rent to the owners.
It is a curious fact, that the Egyptian farmer paid the same
proportionate rent which is paid by the British farmer of the present
day. Rent in Egypt three thousand years ago, was one fifth of the gross
produce. The circumstances of Egypt, of course, almost exclude the idea
of average land, for any one acre anywhere was likely to be as good as
any other acre anywhere else, all being fluviatile alluvium similarly
compounded. And all were subject to much the same atmospheric conditions.
There could therefore be the same rent for the whole kingdom. But if
the land did anywhere, from some exceptional cause, produce more or
less, this was met by the system of paying a fifth. With respect to this
country, however, we must talk of averages. The average gross produce
of average farms is here, I suppose, estimated in money, about eight
pounds an acre; and the average rent of such a farm is about thirty-two
shillings an acre. Just one fifth. Exactly the proportion that was paid,
as rent for the land they occupied, by the tenants of Potiphar, Captain
of the Guard, and of Potipherah, Priest of On, Joseph’s father-in-law.
The same rent was paid by the occupiers of the farms on the royal demesne
to Pharaoh himself.
It may also be worth while noticing how similar circumstances produced in
those remote times, and produce in our own, similar tastes and manners.
Those old Egyptian landlords were not altogether unlike their English
representatives. There are traces in them of a family likeness. They were
much addicted to field-sports. You see this everywhere in the sculptures
and paintings. You find there plenty of scenes of fowling, fishing, and
hunting; of running down the gazelle, and spearing the hippopotamus; of
coursing and netting hares; and of shooting wild cattle with arrows, and
of catching them with the lasso. They had their fish-ponds as well as
their game-preserves. They had, too, their game laws. They were fond of
dogs and of horses. They kept very good tables. They gave morning and
evening parties. They amused themselves with games of skill and chance.
They thought a great deal of their ancestors, as well they might, for a
thousand years went but for little in the date of the patents of their
nobility. They built fine houses, and furnished them handsomely. They
paid great attention to horticulture and arboriculture.
If the estates in Egypt were all of the same size as the military
allotments mentioned by Herodotus, and the probability is that they were,
they must have been about ten acres each. This may be reckoned as fully
equal to thirty acres here; for in Egypt the land is all of the best
description, and is manured every year by the inundation; and two crops
at least can every year be secured from it, the cultivation being almost
like that of a garden under irrigation. This would be ample for those
who cultivated their land themselves. Those who let it for a fifth would
of course get that proportion of every crop. The man therefore who had
forty-two estates, as we find it recorded of an old Egyptian on his tomb,
had a very considerable income. It would be interesting to know how he
came to acquire so many estates; whether by inheritance, by purchase,
or by favour of the Crown; whether there were any statutory limits to
the acquisition of landed property; and whether provisions were made for
dispersing a man’s accumulations at his death: for instance, supposing he
had received several estates from the Crown, was he merely a life-tenant
without power of absolute disposal, the estates reverting at his death to
the Crown? What was the rule of distribution generally followed in their
wills? How was the property of an Egyptian, who died intestate, disposed
of?