NORTH-WESTER V PROVINCES AND OUDI. 387 primarily responsible; and bhayachira, in which portions of the land are held in severalty, while other portions may be held in common, with joint responsibility for the Government demand. In this case the revenue is made up from the rents of the common land, if any, and by a cess on the individual holdings, apportioned by custom, or on a fixed scale. Of the whole area under the plough, between one - fourth and one-fifth in the temporarily settled Districts is cultivated by the proprietors themselves, and the remainder is held by tenants who pay rent, in the more backward tracts in kind, but over by far the greater part of the Provinces in cash, The tenants, again, are divided into two classes, those with and those without rights of occupancy. The status of the former depends on the length of his tenure ; and when a field has been held for twelve years continuously by the same cultivator, he cannot be ejected except by regular suit and on legally defined grounds, nor is he liable to hare his rent raised arbitrarily beyond the average rate paid by the same class of tenants in the neighbourhood. The tenant of the second class holds his land entirely at the will of the owner. In the three Divisions of Agra, Rohilkhand, and Allahábád, between a third and a half of the cultivated area is held with rights of occupancy. In Meerut and the temporarily settled portions of Benares, about half that proportion. The remainder is held by tenantsat-will. The areas in the occupancy of each cultivating family are exceedingly minute ; and the size of farms ranges from Sacres in the Upper Doáb to little over 3 acres in the more densely populated Districts in the eastern part of the Provinces. Rent.-As regards rent, it is probable that rent originally consisted in a fixed share of the produce. This form of payment still exists over a large portion of the Provinces, but is almost entirely confined to special tracts, such as the northern Districts of Oudh and Rohilkhand, where the population is scanty and the produce precarious. The increasing density of the population, while it improved the style of cultivation, made it difficult to feed the same number on the same area without reducing the proportion of the produce paid as rent, and the conversion of grain rents into cash was facilitated by the recent large influx of er. The intermediate stages in the process were many and various. Sometimes a cash rent was paid on every plough in lieu of the former grain rent; sometimes a rate was fixed for every class of land corresponding to its prored fertility; and sometimes a rate on each kind of crop, which varied with its market value. But the most common form was for the landlord to send an appraiser at harvest time, who estimated the weight of the standing crop, calculated the share which was due as rent, and its value in cash to be paid to the proprietor. After a few years of valuation, a fixed money rent equal to the average
