years or three lives, and there were some perpetuities. Land was
then so valuable that when a small estate came into the market--large
estates hardly ever did--they brought from twenty-five to thirty
years' purchase. The large tracts of church land, which are now among
the richest and most desirable in the country, presented at the
close of the last century, a melancholy contrast to the farms that
surrounded them. The reason is given by Sir Charles Coote. It is most
instructive and suggestive at the present time. He says, 'It is very
discouraging for a wealthy farmer to have anything to do with church
lands, as his improvements cannot even be secured to him during his
own life, or the life of his landlord, but he may at any time be
deprived of the fruits of his industry, by the incumbent changing his
living, as his interest then terminates.' This evil was remedied first
by making the leases renewable, on the payment of fines, and, in our
own time, an act was passed enabling the tenants to convert their
leaseholds into perpetuities. The consequence is, that the church
lands now present some of the finest features in the social landscape,
occupied by a class of resident gentry, an essential link, in any
well-organised society, between the people and the great proprietors.
The Board of Trinity College felt so strongly the necessity of giving
fixed tenures, if permanent improvements were to be effected on their
estates, that, without waiting for a general measure of land reform,
they obtained, in 1861, a private act of parliament giving them power
to grant leases for ninety-nine years. 'The legislature,' says Dr.
Hancock, 'thus gave partial effect in the case of one institution to
the recommendation which the Land Occupation Commissioners intended to
apply to all estates in the hands of public boards in Ireland.'

Armagh was always free from middlemen. The landlord got what Sir
Charles Coote calls a rack rent from the occupying tenant, and it