Northumberland       20 to 25     Hereford     20 to  30
Cumberland           20 to 40     Somerset     20 to  40
York                 10 to 50     Oxford       25 to  50
Lancaster             5 to 30     Suffolk      up to  70
Stafford             10 to 25     Essex        25 to 100
Leicester               40        Kent         15 to 100
Nottingham           14 to 50     Hants        25 to 100
Warwick              25 to 60     Wilts        10 to  75
Huntington           40 to 50     Devon        10 to  25
Derby                14 to 25     Cornwall     10 to 100

This large reduction in the rent rolls of landowners has materially affected their position and weakened their power.  Many, indeed, have been driven from their estates, while others can only live on them by letting the mansion house and the shooting, and occupying some small house on the lands they are reluctant to leave.  The agricultural depression, which set in about 1875, may in short be said to have effected a minor social revolution, and to have completed the ruin of the old landed aristocracy as a class.  The depreciation of their rents may be judged from the following figures[690]: 

  Gross annual value of lands, including
  tithes, under Schedule A in England.  Decrease.

1879-80               1893-4            Amount.    Per cent. 
L                     L                 L

      48,533,340 36,999,846 11,533,494 23.7

These figures, however, are far from indicating the full extent of the decline in the rental value of purely agricultural land, as they include ornamental grounds, gardens, and other properties, and do not take into account temporary remissions of rent.  Sir James Caird, as early as 1886, estimated the average reduction on agricultural rents at 30 per cent.

The loss in the capital value of land has inevitably been great from this reduction in rents, and has been aggravated by the fact that the confidence of the public in agricultural land as an investment has been much shaken.  In 1875 thirty years’ purchase on the gross annual value of land was the capital value, in 1894 only eighteen years’ purchase; and whereas the capital value of land in the United Kingdom was in 1875 L2,007,330,000, in 1894 it was L1,001,829,212, a decrease of 49.6 per cent.  Moreover, landlords have incurred increased expenditure on repairs, drainage, and buildings, and taxation has grown enormously.  On the occupiers of land the effect of the depression was no less serious, their profits having fallen on an average 40 per cent.[691] Occupying owners had suffered as much as any other class, both yeomen who farmed considerable farms and small freeholders.  Many of the former had bought land in the good times when land was dear and left a large portion of the purchase money on mortgage, with the result that the interest on the mortgage was now more than the rent of the land.[692]