Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), pp. 37–57

This paper examines changing farm rents between 1670 and 1830 across six estates in two contrasting Scottish Lowland counties. It largely endorses the established view that payments in kind generally started to be commuted to money rents in the mid-eighteenth century, although significant conversions occurred on some estates much earlier. Before the 1750s, progress towards monetization was often limited by proprietors' preference for cautiously progressive estate improvement, their continuing command of the market (which inhibited wider tenant market participation), and their conviction that grain rents provided surer protection against market price fluctuations than fixed or only infrequently renegotiable money rents. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries farm rents (by then, mainly money rents) rose between three and a half and four times original rents, calculated over 30-year periods of sustained improvement on four of the six estates, a rise of increase thought by some to be optimal for improving farms at the time. Tenant allowances, temporary rent-abatements and punitive legal action were all employed to promote farm improvement. 

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