[Footnote 1:  See Ashley, op. cit., vol. i. pt. ii. pp. 434-9.]

If there were any doubt about the fact that the scholastics recognised the legitimacy of unearned income, it would be dispelled by an understanding of their teaching on rents and partnership, in the former of which they distinctly acknowledged the right to draw an unearned income from one’s land, and in the latter of which they acknowledged the same right in regard to one’s money.[1]

[Footnote 1:  On this discussion see Ashley, Economic History, vol. i. pt. ii. pp. 427 et seq.; Rambaud, Histoire, pp. 57 et seq.; Funk, Zins und Wucher; Arnold, Zur Geschichte des Eigenthums, pp. 92 et seq.; Boehm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest (Eng. trans.), pp. 1-39.]

Sec. 8. Rent Charges.

There was never any difficulty about admitting the justice of receiving a rent from a tenant in occupation of one’s lands, because land was understood to be essentially a thing of which the use could be sold apart from the ownership; and it was also recognised that the recipient of such a rent might sell his right to a third party, who could then demand the rent from the tenant.  When this was admitted it was but a small step to admit the right of the owner of land to create a rent in favour of another person in consideration for some payment.  The distinctions between a census reservativus, or a rent established when the possession of land was actually transferred to a tenant, and a census constitutivus, or a rent created upon property remaining in the possession of the payer, did not become the subject of discussion or difficulty until the sixteenth century.[1] The legitimacy of rent charges does not seem to have been questioned by the theologians; the best proof of this being the absence of controversy about them in a period when they were undoubtedly very common, especially in Germany.[2] Langenstein, whose opinion on the subject was followed by many later writers,[3] thought that the receipt of income from rent charges was perfectly justifiable, when the object was to secure a provision for old age, or to provide an income for persons engaged in the services of Church or State, but that it was unjustifiable if it was intended to enable nobles to live in luxurious idleness, or plebeians to desert honest toil.  It is obvious that Langenstein did not regard rent charges as wrongful in themselves, but simply as being the possible occasions of wrong.[4]

[Footnote 1:  Ashley, op. cit., vol. i. pt. ii. p. 409.]

[Footnote 2:  Endemann, Studien, vol. ii. p. 104.]

[Footnote 3:  Endemann, Studien, vol. ii. p. 109.]

[Footnote 4:  Roscher, Geschichte, p. 20.]