THE RENTING CONTRACT 1 1. Price of the separable use. § 2. Medieval land tenures and the usance of land. § 3. Land destruction and repair. ¢ 4. The medieval rent-charge as a sale of income. § 5. Definition of the renting contract. 1 6. Renting of agricultural land. ¢ 7. Renting of urban real-estate. 1 8. Renting of dwellings. § 9. Renting of real-estate for business uses. § 10. The renting contract in other cases. § 11. Buying the usance with out the renting contract. § 12. Unsuitability of the renting contract in commerce. 1 13. Definition of rent. Note on Various meanings of rent.
§ 1. Price of the separable use. Wherever there is a thing of value there is a chance that trade will occur between men, and that a price will result. In our discussion of price above (Chapter 7) we fixed our attention upon those cases where concrete objects with direct uses are traded as wholes, such as loaves of bread, apples, and horses. The owner of such a commodity must usually sell the whole object if he is to sell the uses that it contains. The price is built upon the valuations—in the minds of the various traders—of the to tality of uses contained in the goods. Now the valuation of\ the uses separately—the conception of usance—makes pos sible the problem of price in a different form, that of the buy ing and selling of the separable uses, leaving the ownership of, the durative agent unchanged. The simplest way to buy the uses of a thing would seem to be to buy the use-bearer out right—boat, horse, house, land, with all its uses. But the sale of the separable use may under some conditions be simpler and more advantageous to both parties than the sale of the use-bearer itself.
§ 2. Medieval land tenures and the usance of land. Doubtless the perception of this advantage led to multitudes of 143 loose bargains for the use of personal belongings in earlier conditions of society ; I but the first great development of usance-trade was in the case of land. In ways and for reasons which need not be described here, land ownership in all the early civilizations was bound up with certain political rights and dignities. The land was not a personal possession, it could not be sold outright (in most cases) ; it must be passed on to the heir and successor of the landlord. The landlord got his income from those to whom the land-uses were granted. Even as late as feudal times in medieval Europe the whole social organization was built around land ten ures.
Land and the things pertaining to it, such as ditches, houses, mills, cattle, and stock, constituted the wealth of the rulers and landlords. Land was granted to the vassal, or to the tenant or to the serf in return for produce, and for services, some military and some agricultural in character. The contract, expressed or customary, was known and care fully interpreted in all its items. The tenant was held strictly to his duty to keep the land in nearly undiminished fertility. A certain mode of using the land was enforced ; certain limitations were placed upon the use of pastures, of forests, and of fields. Moreover, the tenant had an interest or equity in the land because the rent he had to pay was fixed by custom, not by competition, and always, probably, was less than a competitive price would have been. The landlord, therefore, could count in good part on the undiminished power of his land and stock from one year to another.
It would be a mistake to see in these early and medieval relations between a king and his vassals, and between land owners and the serfs on their estates, more than a vague and embryonic form of rent-contract. Political rather than eco nomic relations were dominant; it was a time of status rather 1 See on the lack of definite notions of price among fellow-members of tribes in primitive society, selections from Herbert Spencer and from Sir Henry Maine, in the "Source Book in Economics," pp. 3-14.
than of free Originally in taking the land and pledging loyalty to his feudal superior, each vassal, high or low, assumed pretty definite obligations, some of a military, others of a political, others of an economic nature. But there after in the thought of that time there was but vaguely present the notion of contract in the modern sense as regulating the economic relations of the descendants, peasant and landlord, or landlord and his feudal superior. "Each man took his place in accordance with inherited and forced, rather than free, contracts." 8 But gradually there developed a more modern form of agreement between the owner of land and the tenant. Rent-payment by the tenant and wage-payment by the landlord for any work done on his domain by the peasants were counterparts in this development in which con tract was gradually displacing custom, status, and inheritance.