In addition to the few English-managed estates it was only in Ulster
that matters were otherwise, owing to the existence of the custom--an
embryo copyhold, Lord Devon called it--known as tenant-right. On the
various confiscations of land, grants of which had been made to the
"undertakers," many of the latter were either public bodies, such as the
great City Companies, others were landlords who, even if not resident at
a distance, had neither the means nor the inclination to spend the
necessary money on their estates. This was provided by the tenant, who,
without aid from the landlord, made improvements on his holding by his
own labour; and in Ulster, where the tenants were settlers from England
and Scotland, there arose an equitable proprietorship vested in the
occupier, by which, on quitting the farm, he was entitled to claim from
the new tenant a sum of money partly in compensation for the money and
labour he had invested in the holding and partly as a price paid for the
goodwill or possession, which the new tenant would have no other means
of acquiring. The nature of this "Ulster Custom," which, until 1870, had
no sanction or protection from the law, was clearly defined by the
Master of the Rolls, in the case of M'Elroy _v._ Brooke, in the
following words:--"The essentials of the custom are the right to sell, to
have the incoming tenant, if there be no reasonable objection to him,
recognised by the landlord, and to have a sum of money paid for the
interest in the tenancy transferred." The English system we see then,
with its competitive rent fixed by contract, and subject to the laws of
supply and demand, did not exist; the social and prescriptive ties which
in England bound the owner and the occupier to each other never arose
under this state of things, and in their absence did not arise one of
the strongest inducements to a landed gentry to live on their estates
and to concern themselves in the welfare of their tenants, a social
system which, by the interchange of kindly offices wherever in England