Saundby Hall, of 607 acres, nearly all meadow and pasture, was 9s. 10d. an acre.  The cottages were fortunate in having pieces of land attached to them.  In Saundby, Richard Ffydall rented a cottage and 2 acres of arable land for L1 13s. 4d.; Widow Johnson a cottage and yard for 13s. 4d.; William Daubney a cottage with 6-1/2 acres of arable and 5-1/2 acres of pasture for L7 18s. 6d.  A farm in Scrooby, consisting of a messuage, cottage, and 113 acres of arable, meadow, and pasture, only let at L23.

As to the freehold value of land, in 1621, according to D’Ewes, it was worth from sixteen to twenty years’ purchase; yet, in 1688, Sir Josiah Child said that lands now sell at twenty years’ purchase, which fifty or sixty years before sold at eight or ten; and he also states, ’the same farms or lands to be now sold would yield treble and in some cases six times the money they were sold for fifty years ago’.[267] Davenant puts land at twelve years’ purchase in 1600, at eighteen years in 1688.[268] In 1729 the price of land was said to be twenty-seven years’ purchased.[269]

The legislation against laying down tillage to grass was continued until the end of the sixteenth century.  The statute 39 Eliz., c. 1, repealed 4 Hen.  VII, c. 19, and all other Acts against pulling down houses, and provided that a house of husbandry should be a house that hath or hath had 20 acres of arable land.  All such houses which had been destroyed during the last seven years were to be rebuilt, and if destroyed more than seven years only one-half was to be rebuilt; but to each of them at least 40 acres of land were to be attached.

The next statute, 39 Eliz., c. 2, sets forth once more the advantages of tillage, viz. the increase and multiplying of people for service in the wars, and in time of peace the employment of a greater number of people, the keeping of people from poverty, the dispersal of the wealth of the kingdom in many hands, and ’the standing of this realm upon itself without depending upon foreign countries’[270]; and therefore enacts that lands converted from tillage to pasture shall be restored to tillage within three years, and lands then in tillage should be so continued; but this was only to extend to twenty-three counties, and omitted most of those in the south-west.  At the beginning of the seventeenth century a reaction set in; the price of corn had risen immensely and continued to do so, the price of wool remained stationary, and tillage was as profitable as grass.  In 1620 Coke speaks of the man who only kept a shepherd and a dog as one who never prospered.  In 1624 several of the tillage laws were repealed.[271]